Webinar: how Tata Steel is speeding up development with data analytics

ON 25 June, The Chemical Engineer will host a webinar looking at how Tata Steel has used experiment design to optimise the development cycle of new products.

Ahead of the meeting, we spoke with Tata Steel Researcher Bernard Ennis and Hadley Myers, a Systems Engineer at analytics software company JMP to get an understanding of what the audience will learn.

Myers says the webinar will involve looking at the custom designer within JMP’s analytics software and the more modern design of experiment technique called definitive screening design.

“It will be useful because it helps people to optimise their process faster,” he says.

Ennis has first-hand experience using the technique to help develop new steel grades, which has involved analysing production data to optimise chemistries.

“One of the big challenges is that we have a limited resource and we want to try and get more steel grades developed in a shorter time to market. If you’re not careful you end up with certain bottlenecks or certain pieces of equipment where you just physically can’t do any more experiments,” Ennis says.

Using definitive screening techniques, the team has significantly increased its efficiency.

“Within two weeks we had the answer that had previously taken 200 experiments. In a tenth of the time, we had the same information from the definitive screening design as from the full factorial approach.”

Ennis adds: “We’re going to show you a real industrial case study from a real company that is very traditional and conservative, that we’ve used this [technique] and got answers.”

This webinar took place on 25 June. The recording has been archived.