Digital Twin Project Team Visited Burns Harbor

March 7, 2022
Individuals standing in a row in an industrial setting wearing green uniform jumpsuits and yellow hard hats and safety goggles

On February 25, 2022, Kyle Toth, CIVS Senior Research Engineer, Aleeha Zafar, CIVS Graduate Assistant, and Yifan Fei, CIVS Senior Design student visited the Cleveland Cliffs Burns Harbor Casting Operations. This site visit is to gather more information on the current work on the AIST Digital Transformation project and prepare for an upcoming continuation of that project entitled “Enhancement of a Process Digital Twin for Continuous Casting”.

Nicholas Gregurich, the Steelmaking – Casting Operations Manager at Cleveland Cliffs Burns Harbor, and Lidia Yakovleva, the Steelmaking – Associate Operations Engineer at Cleveland Cliffs Burns Harbor hosted the visit and facilitated the meeting. Evan Bajek and Cole Given, the Process Automation Engineers at Cleveland Cliffs Burns Harbor also attended the meeting.

During the visit, they discussed the updates regarding the expected outcomes of the project, the follow-up steps to set up for the continuation of the project, and how students would contact and work with the team at Burns Harbor as the project continues. Students also got to tour the caster that they are working within the software to model and represent and got to ask all sorts of questions related to the real world caster that may have never been thought of or come up with while dealing with the purely virtual caster. This visit gave the students the opportunity to obtain a deeper understanding of their project and helped them to build up an even better project in the future.