Research progress and application status of deep learning in steelmaking process

The steel industry is an important embodiment of national productivity and contributes to the development of the national economy and defense construction as a material foundation. Recently, China’s crude steel production ranked first in the world and in 2020, it exceeded 1 billion tons for the first time, reaching 1.065 billion tons. However, the steel industry is also a major energy consumer and polluter. In the current national coordination to do a good job of “carbon peak” and “carbon-neutral” background, the traditional steelmaking process urgently needs to be transformed into intelligent and green. Recently, as an important branch of machine learning, with artificial neural networks as the basic architecture, deep learning, a nonlinear modeling algorithm that can extract features from data and realize knowledge learning, has been applied in various industrial fields. The steelmaking process is an extremely complex industrial scenario with many influencing factors and high-security requirements. It is also an area where deep learning has not been applied on a large scale yet. Accordingly, in this study, the principles and types of deep learning were compared, and the development history and research status of deep learning in the steelmaking process with domestic and foreign application examples were summarized. The application of deep learning to the steelmaking process mainly has the advantages of simple feature extraction, strong generalization ability, and high model plasticity, but it also faces the challenges of high data dependency, difficult preprocessing, and verification of production safety. In the future, with the application of high-precision sensors, popularization of the Internet of Things, iteration of computing hardware, and innovation of algorithms, deep learning models can be effectively applied to more scenarios in steelmaking, which will promote the intelligent development of the metallurgical industry.