SunCoke Energy operates six sites in the US and Brazil for the conversion of metallurgical coal into metallurgical coke used in the manufacture of steel. The core technology used across the coke oven batteries has remained consistent across the sites leading to common analytical concepts. Traditionally, we have utilized spreadsheets along with PI DataLink to drive our analyses. However, each plant has been responsible for their own performance indicators leading to multiple versions of the same themes. By utilizing PI Asset Framework (PI AF), we are driving toward consistent analyses for fleet-wide Operational Intelligence.
Oven performance is critical to the overall performance of the site - production yield and operating/maintenance costs are critical levers to our success. By linking data such as oven inspections to temperature trends to material balance data, we are better prepared to control and optimize our costs and performance. By using template solutions through PI AF, we begin to compare site-to-site through defined metrics for troubleshooting and solutions."
Speaker
Stephen Reynolds
Stephen Reynolds, graduate of Texas A&M in Chemical Engineering. He has worked through a diverse process background including polymers, monomers, phenol, and now metallurgical coke. Having been a longtime consumer of PI System data, he is now in a position to design solutions and drive SunCoke's optimization of the PI System.