Transformation of Time-based Sensor Data to Material Quality Data in Stainless Steel Production

Sammanfattning: Quality assurance in the stainless steel production requires large amounts of sensor data to monitor the processing steps. Digitalisation of the production would allow higher levels of control to both evaluate and increase the quality of the end products. At Outokumpu Avesta Works, continuous processing of coils creates sensor data without connecting it to individual steel coils, a connection needed to achieve the promises of digitalisation. In this project, the time series data generated from 12 sensors in the continuous processing was analysed and four alternative methods to connect the data to coils were presented. A method based on positional time series was deemed the most suitable for the data and was selected for implementation over other methods that would apply time series analysis on the sensor data itself. Evaluations of the selected method showed that it was able to connect sensor data to 98.10 % of coils, just short of reaching the accuracy requirement of 99 %. Because the overhead of creating the positional time series was constant regardless of the number of sensors, the performance per sensor improved with increased number of sensors. The median processing time for 24 hours of sensor data was less than 20 seconds per sensor when batch processing eight or more sensors. The performance for processing fewer than four sensors was not as good, requiring further optimization to reach the requirement of 30 seconds per sensor. Although the requirements were not completely fulfilled, the implemented method can still be used on historical production data to facilitate further quality estimation of stainless steel coils