Heat treatment path towards sustainable and CO2-neutral manufacturing through digital tools and renewable fuels

Kus Paulina - Air Products PLC (United Kingdom)

Ambitious climate targets and social responsibility drive the industry to reduce their CO2-emissions and to become climate-neutral by 2050. Achieving this target without a big impact on the bottom line can only happen through a sum of small steps. This could mean starting with improving the efficiency of the heat treatment process, either through reducing the raw materials input or less energy consumption, to finally replacing the carbon-intense fuels with renewable energy sources in the production.

Nowadays, classical heat treatment processes such as annealing and sintering are conducted in nitrogen and hydrogen atmospheres. In most cases, those treatments aim to enhance the properties of treated materials. Despite that, heat treaters still heavily rely on fixed gas blends and an empirical approach to adjust the process set points. Lack of process monitoring makes detecting quality variations possible only after the heat treatment operation is completed, and finding the cause becomes a difficult and lengthy process.

The time has finally come to forfeit the “worst-case scenario” approach to process and atmosphere settings and focus on improving the operation efficiency, reducing process waste, and lowering part’s CO2-footprint. The clear answer to current industry challenges and improving furnace operation lies in deploying digital tools such as cloud-based data analytics and machine learning. Collecting the data, monitoring deviations, and identifying links between process values and part quality enables identifying the optimum settings a lot quicker, and make them specific to the part type or material rather than “one-fits-all” solution.

This paper describes how Air Products supports the industry through multiple platforms along every step of the way towards sustainable manufacturing. Beginning with a cloud-based process optimisation platform to building a resilient supply chain of renewable fuels such as hydrogen and methane to complete the journey of industrial decarbonization.