Study of different approaches for pickling process plant sustainability into the production cycle of stainless steels

It is well known that environmental protection regulations for the manufacturing production have a relevant impact on every sector and its future development. At now, the priority into the industrial landscape is limiting emissions in every environmental compartment (air, water and soil), using resources in a rational way (especially the energy consumption requested for industrial processes) and managing the industrial plants in a sustainable way reducing the sub-products production. For the once produced, it is fundamental to promote a reutilization of them into the production cycle as a primary resource. All these aspects represent technological challenges where research assumes an essential role. For the steelmaking sector, a significant amount of work has already been performed. This work is placed in a context of circularizing the production of stainless steel with the purpose of introducing the company Acciai Speciali Terni into an optic of «reduce, reuse, recycle» for defined production phases, not yet managed in a sustainable way. The purpose is to find out the “best practice” of production in an annealing and pickling line for stainless steel strips, with the target of maximizing its environmental sustainability in terms of wastes reduction and cost savings. The attention will be placed on the chemical pickling sections of the chosen “pilot” process line. After a description of the classes of stainless steel produced from the industrial site, it will be analyzed their production cycle with a focus on the pickling processes existing and the technologies used into the company. From that, different approaches will be proposed to minimize reagents consumptions and adapt new sustainable technologies to the existing plant.