Benchmarking of energy consumption of continuous galvanizing lines

Abstract

A case study revealed that more than 13,500 MMBtu of energy is wasted annually when a single galvanizing line is off-production for hardware replacement for duration of a few hours every 2 weeks. This energy if utilized for production will yield about 13,000 tons of Galvanized Sheet Steel annually from a single galvanizing line. Thus for the 57 [1] hot dip galvanizing lines in US this figure results in a production loss of 741,000 tons/year. An attempt has been made to develop a spreadsheet that will take into account all the major energy consuming equipment in a typical hot dip continuous line. It maintains a track of the current production and energy consumption. It can simulate a scenario where either the number of shutdowns or the hours per shutdown will be reduced as a consequence of better material developed by the researchers. Different charts pertaining to energy consumed by different equipment group, total cost of energy spent on natural gas and electricity, MMBtu/Ton, Tons/Year and Production time before shutdowns assists the engineers decide the best operating stretch to suite their production rate and optimize energy consumption to some extent. Validation data gathered from the three well established galvanizing lines powers this spreadsheet to forecast annual increase in production and thus helps judge the performance of the new hardware.