11/13/2020 Zack Fishman
Kim joins Material Sciences Professor Dallas Trinkle and University of Florida Professor and Chair Michele V. Manuel to design new manufacturing processes that involve magnetic fields.
Written by Zack Fishman
ISE Professor Harrison Kim, as part of an interdisciplinary research team, has been awarded nearly $11 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to reduce the energy consumed during steel production.
Kim joins Material Sciences Professor Dallas Trinkle and University of Florida Professor and Chair Michele V. Manuel to design new manufacturing processes that involve magnetic fields. They will use less energy to produce alloys for steel than traditional steelmaking.
Kim will contribute his expertise in systems modeling and optimization, which will allow the team to compare trade-offs between performance and cost to create the most efficient processes. The project will be the first of its kind to apply magnetic field technology at a large scale.
“The idea of utilizing magnetic fields is innovation, as well as the scale of the project that we are aiming at,” Kim said.
Their research is one of 55 projects awarded funding by the DOE in a $187 million initiative to strengthen U.S. manufacturing competitiveness, which was announced by the department in February.
Global steel production is rising worldwide and reached an all-time high in 2018, with 1.8 billion metric tons produced, according to a 2019 report from the World Steel Association. The U.S., the world’s fourth largest steel producer, made 86.6 million metric tons of the material in 2018, which required 1.6% of the country’s energy production.
The energy consumed by producing steel often comes from burning fossil fuels. By making production processes more efficient, the team’s upcoming research would benefit both steelmakers and the environment.
“If you reduce the energy consumption, obviously the costs associated with the energy will be reduced,” Kim said. “Reducing the energy consumption in the manufacturing process will in turn reduce CO2 emissions.”
Kim stressed the interdisciplinary nature of the project and complimented the “synergy” he sees in the team.
“I'm very much looking forward to the collaboration, and this is an exciting development, that we can collaborate together as a team of materials science and systems design and optimization research,” he says. “We’re proud of this huge team.”