REDUCING ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF STEEL PRODUCT MANUFACTURING

摘要

The automobile industry has experienced serious economic losses in recent years. Possible driving factors are the increasing cost of energy, higher costs for raw materials, and shifts in consumer behavior. It is imperative that automakers be proactive to ensure development of responsible and appropriate products that contribute to sustained economic development. Adoption of life-cycle thinking and materials and energy management could help in revealing novel industry strategies. Two critical, linked product life cycle stages are material processing and manufacturing. A process modeling approach is described and applied to illustrate manufacturing environmental performance improvement for steel-intensive products, e.g., vehicles. Models for steelmaking, sand casting, and heat treatment operations are described. It is shown that environmental performance analysis can lead to reductions in electrical energy/natural gas use and consumption of steel scrap and other raw materials, as well as reductions in solid wastes and air emissions.