CIVS Testimonial: Dr. Sara Hornby
What a learning experience my year as the Elliott Lecturer has been, and my trip to Purdue University NW Campus (PNW) in Hammond IN the 8th April exceeded expectations in many ways. I am very grateful for the mutual sharing opportunity this visit presented and ratification from some steel industry collaborators who were present at my Clean Steel Revolution Lecture.
Professor Chenn Zhou, NIPSCO Distinguished Professor of Engineering Simulations and Founding Director of the Center for Innovation through Visualization and Simulation (CIVS founded in 2009) was the perfect hostess and “director of operations”.
Professor Zhou and her team, understanding the need to assist the steel industry in addressing their challenges, founded the Steel Manufacturing Simulation and Visualization Consortium (SMSVC) in 2016, inside CIVS. This consortium, 15 steel industry partners strong, generate real life industry relevant challenges and present potential barriers to the PNW CIVS staff, all non-metallurgically trained. They have even created an integrated virtual Blast Furnace (BF) through which one can walk inside during operation.
Industry can and are using the CIVS capabilities to model projects, process, challenges and then visualize it. Some industry driven, some in collaboration with the DOE which has enabled PNW to collaborate with >180 external organizations, producing >$40M savings. They have received a number of multimillion-dollar federal grants to work with industrial partners for increasing energy efficiency, productivity and product quality, reducing emissions. enhancing safety and workforce development, as well as improving competitiveness of steel industry.
Click here to read about her lecture.
CIVS in collaboration with the industry integrates CFD models, augmented and virtual reality, visualization, AI and smart sensors to provide physics-based and data-driven virtual process simulators of industrial processes to help decision makers understand plant operations, challenges, root causes of problems, in a timely and cost-effective fashion.
I was amazed viewing some of their projects and their capabilities (so far outside my realm of expertise!). With the help of AI, they can develop and offer industry training – I witnessed crane operator training using a replica of a nearby steel mill down the “cab and controls”. This training simulator was authentic, immersive, interactive, realistic, allowing for safer and more rapid training.
What fantastic tools PNW’s CIVS has – they allow “proof of the pudding” prior to the expansive and expensive pilots/demos. They have proven they can give confidence in solutions. I have already promoted their capabilities to a new steel industry organization!