Steel is one of 9 industries targeted by the DOE-EE Office of Industrial Technologies as an Industry of the Future.
Learn more about research and development needs for this industry by accessing the ITP web site.
Fact Sheets
- INL Laser Ultrasonic Camera — 146kB PDF
- RSP Tooling — 75kB PDF
The Steel Industry of the Future partnership is making strides in improving the energy efficiency of steel production, as well as product quality, reducing equipment downtime, and improve steel quality. The steel industry spends less on R&D as a percent of sales than the other major industrial sectors. Therefore, cost-sharing through collaborations between the Office of Industrial Technologies and industry helps leverage these funds by supporting R&D activities in the steel industry, supplier companies, the National Laboratories, and universities.
Using an industry-defined vision of what the steel industry should look like by the year 2020, the steel industry and the U.S. Department of Energy are using this strategy to build collaborations to develop and deploy technologies crucial to the industry’s future. To facilitate the implementation of the industry vision, DOE has formed a crosscutting Steel Team within the Idustrial Technologies Program. Read the technology Vision and Roadmap for this industry area.
Major focus areas include:
- Process Efficiency — to seek improvement in throughput, quality, and energy efficiency.
- Recycling — to increase steel recycling and recovery of iron units from plant solid wastes.
- Environmental Engineering — to achieve further reductions in air and water emissions and generation of hazardous wastes, and to develop new processes to avoid pollution rather than control and treat it.
- Product Development — to be increasingly responsive to ever-changing market demands and customer needs by achieving maximum flexibility in production capabilities. Increases in sales to key markets will occur as the industry introduces products with new properties to meet the demand for changing materials in the 21st Century.
INL’s role
The INL’s applied engineering resources, chemists, and environmental expertise are readily available to the assist the steel industry.
- Contact:
- Dr. Marty Sorensen, (208) 526-9662, Send E-mail