Company Announcement - At the world’s leading trade fair for metallurgical plant making and mechanical engineering, the SMS group will be presenting itself as a systems supplier

Every four years, experts from all over the world come to Düsseldorf, Germany, to visit the trade fairs GIFA, METEC, THERMPROCESS and NEWCAST in order to get the latest of information about new technologies and solutions in all areas of metallurgy. The event, staged from June 16 to 20, 2015 under the motto “The Bright World of Metals”, is expected to draw around 80,000 visitors to the four trade fairs. Being one of the leading suppliers of metallurgical systems solutions for the steel and NF metals industry, the SMS group will participate with two trade fair booths covering a total floor space of around 1,500 square meters. On the METEC booth in hall 5 (5/E22) and the GIFA/THERM¬PROCESS booth in hall 10 (10/H41), visitors will get first-hand information about the entire technology and service portfolio of the SMS group.

Additionally, experts of the SMS group will be presenting new developments and successful reference projects from the last few years at ESTAD 2015 (European Steel Technology and Application Days) in around 60 technical papers. The ESTAD 2015 conference will be held at Congress Centrum Düsseldorf from June 15 to 19, 2015.

On the METEC booth, the visitors will have the opportunity to experience live the solutions offered by the SMS group, for example, by physically operating a control pulpit and actively controlling the rolling process in a heavy-plate mill stand. The process will be shown at the Data Analysis and Vision Desk – called DAVID. Based on this form of virtual process representation, it is possible to evaluate process-relevant data and discuss the obtained information with other experts during running production.

The central topic of this year’s METEC will be “Growth Engine Metallurgy – Designing the Future Efficiently and in an Eco-friendly Way”, underscoring two of the main challenges facing the plant and mechanical engineering sector in the global competitive environment: efficiency and sustainability. The companies of the SMS group put great emphasis on innovative technologies and a continuous dialog with their customers. To this end, the SMS group’s design engineers also collaborate with external scientists. This facilitates the develop-ment of groundbreaking solutions that possess great potential for the future. One example is a concept developed in collaboration with the Technical University of Clausthal and Salzgitter Flachstahl GmbH: the Belt Casting Technology (BCT®), a horizontal strip casting process.

This process uses much less energy and raw materials than other steel casting processes and the capital investment in a BCT® plant is only about one third of that otherwise required. For this innovation, the team of researchers was put forward for “Deutsche Zukunftspreis 2014”, one of the most important German science awards. The SMS group will also present the USP® plant (Universal Strip Production), a further development of the CSP® thin slab casting and rolling technology. These are only two examples of the portfolio of SMS group technologies, which the METEC visitor will be able to experience.

Another important issue is the growing digitization of economic and manufacturing processes. This development presents the entire metallurgical sector with major new challenges. Also in this field, the companies of the SMS group have already developed various pioneering solutions and are inviting the trade fair visitors to discuss - on the basis of practical examples - where metallurgical technology will be heading in the future.