j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jmrt

Original Article

Slag foaming estimation in the electric arc furnace

using machine learning based long short-term
memory networks

Kyungchan Son a, Jaegak Lee a, Haejin Hwang a, Wonseok Jeon a,

Hyunseok Yang a,*, Il Sohn b, Younghwan Kim c, Hyungsic Um c
a
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yonsei University, 50, Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, 03722, South
Korea
b
Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Yonsei University, 50, Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, 03722,
South Korea
c
Dongkuk Steel R&D Center, 70, Geonposaneop-ro 3214beon-gil, Daesong-Myun, Nam-Gu, Pohang, 37874, South
Korea

article info abstract

Article history: Slag foaming is a key factor in terms of quality and productivity in the electric arc furnace
Received 11 December 2020 (EAF) steelmaking process. Optimal control of slag foaming is required, but is difficult due
Accepted 23 February 2021 to the absence of practical on-line measuring methods and the broad process variability. In
Available online 27 February 2021 this study, a soft sensor model, which correlates the influential process variables with the
slag foaming height, was developed by using machine learning based long short-term
Keywords: memory (LSTM) networks for modeling sequential and nonlinear data. The developed
Electric arc furnace (EAF) model was validated using actual steelmaking dataset in terms of performance metrics
Slag foaming height such as the root mean square error (RMSE), coefficient of determination (R2), and correla-
Long short-term memory (LSTM) tion coefficient corresponding to a value for a SS400 carbon steel grade to be 42.3, 0.905, and
network 0.963, respectively. In order to evaluate the general applicability of the developed model for
Soft sensor model other steel grades, data for A615 and S355 steel grades were also applied and found to
Machine learning satisfy the benchmark standards indicating that the developed model can be applied to the
broad range of other steel grades. Sensitivity-based Pruning (SBP) on the model shows that
electricity, carbon and oxygen are the most influential process variables to the slag
foaming height and could potentially be used to promote enhanced optimization in terms
of energy saving and cost-efficiency for the EAF steelmaking process.
© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC
BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: hsyang@yonsei.ac.kr (H. Yang).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmrt.2021.02.085
2238-7854/© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
556 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8

height from the slag surface [17,19,20]. However, these

1. Introduction methods require frequent equipment replacement due to the
harsh operating environment, i.e. high temperatures and
Electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking is an eco-friendly pro- dust, and cannot measure in real time. Thus, it is difficult to
cess, which recycles end-of-use scrap metal and constitutes control slag foaming from the direct measurement methods.
approximately 30 pct. of the 1.8 billion tons of steels produced The indirect measurement methods utilize various ap-
globally [1,2]. Within the EAF steelmaking process, slagmaking proaches to overcome the limitations in direct measurements.
is essential in absorbing impurities such as sulfur and phos- Some studies use computer vision analysis from images of the
phorous during metal smelting, protecting the steel from re- slag gate [21]. In the same way that operators subjectively
oxidation, and minimizing vertical heat losses to the atmo- observe slag foaming with the naked eye, digital images of the
sphere [3e5]. Slag foaming is well-known to be instigated slag gate are captured with a camera and the slag foaming
through the following chemical reactions of (1) and (2) [6e10]. height is subsequently estimated through image processing.
½C þ ðFeOÞ/COðgÞ þ FeðlÞ (1) However, this method is limited to estimate apparent slag
foaming height from slag gate with inaccurate molten metal
surface as baseline.
1
½C þ O2 /COðgÞ (2) Other works have utilized vibration or acoustic sensors to
2
measure the slag foaming height [21,29]. These approaches
Iron oxide in the slag reacts with the injected carbon and
estimate the slag foaming height by using the characteristic
any excess carbon in the slag and molten metal can also react
acoustic noise and vibration attenuated during slag foaming.
with oxygen. These reactions produce carbon monoxide and
The effective bandwidth related to slag foaming is analyzed
generate bubbles within the slag forming a gaseliquid foam.
and an estimation model is obtained by analyzing the mag-
Depending on the retention of the bubbles within the slag, the
nitudes of the vibration within the effective bandwidth ac-
slag can expand during the EAF steelmaking process.
cording to the supplied arc power and subsequently compared
Optimal slag foaming control is an important requirement
with the reference height from the visual inspections. These
to achieve higher productivity and efficiency in the EAF
indirect approaches seem to provide slag foaming height in
steelmaking process [11e15]. An optimized slag foam can
real time. However, the vibration sensors typically attached
cover the electrodes subsequently protecting direct arc im-
directly to the outer shell of the furnace need to be frequently
pingements on the refractories and allow higher power input
repaired or replaced, and acoustic sensors are vulnerable to
and efficient energy transfer while preventing radiative heat
external noise limiting its continued use in measuring the slag
loss, thereby saving overall energy consumption and
foaming height during high temperature processing. There-
increasing productivity. In contrast, excessive slag foaming
fore, in order to correctly control the slag foaming height, it is
can lead to equipment damage [16] and inefficient use of foam
necessary to develop a practical model of slag foaming
activating materials such as carbon and oxygen, which results
considering the actual industry environment beyond in-situ
in a decrease in cost-efficiency. Thus, slag foaming needs to be
continuous slag foaming measurements.
controlled and properly maintained. However, foaming is
With recent advances in information technology and the
difficult to control partially due to unreliable in-situ
need for smart manufacturing, process operations have
measuring techniques and complex chemical and physical
required optimization through machine learning technology
interactions between the steel and slag. Furthermore, in the
based on big data analytics in a range of industries. Soft
current steelmaking process, slag foaming control relies on
sensing is one emerging machine learning technologies,
the operators’ decision with visual observation that can vary
which can identify specific control variables of a complex
depending on the experience and subjective know-how of the
process similar to the EAF. This method uses easy-to-measure
operators. In this regard, optimal slag foaming control re-
variables to develop an estimation model of target variables,
quires reliable quantitative measuring methods that mini-
which is difficult or impossible to measure, but important due
mize variability in slag foaming assessments.
to technical limitations or high costs [30e35]. Furthermore,
There have been many studies on measurement of slag
the estimation model can describe the relations between
foaming [7,9,17e28]. Slag foaming behavior can be indirectly
variables. In the actual steelmaking process, various data are
assessed in terms of the slag foaming height and evaluated in
recorded for monitoring the operation. Those data include
terms of the foaming index, where the foaming index can be
variables specifically related to slag foaming such as carbon
correlated to the slag physical properties including viscosity,
injection and oxygen flow rate, which are relatively easy to
surface tension and density [17e20,28]. However, these past
measure. By using soft sensing, an estimation model for slag
works were limited to specific conditions and unreliable slag
foaming can be developed and the influence of each variable
physical property measurements making it difficult to apply
can be analyzed. Soft sensor modeling in steelmaking has
in the real complex EAF operating conditions. Considering
already been studied [36], where the slag foaming height was
these limitations, the steel industry is still focused on the
estimated using stepwise regression analysis [37]. However,
measurement and estimation of the precise slag foaming
the stepwise regression is based on linear regression, which
height during steelmaking.
makes it difficult to describe the nonlinear and time-series
Several methods of measuring slag foaming height have
variability of slag foaming accurately.
been developed, which can be divided into direct and indirect
In this study, an estimation model, which predicts the slag
measurement methods [22]. The direct measurement
foaming height in the EAF steelmaking process, has been
methods use an electric probe to measure the slag foaming
developed using big data from 298 sensors recorded during
 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8
Fig. 1 e Schematic diagram and specifications of the operating EAF at the Pohang Works of Dongkuk Steel.
operation of a twin-shell DC-EAF steelmaking process for 105
days. The long short-term memory (LSTM) algorithm was
adopted to deal with the dynamic and nonlinear slag foaming
height. The estimation model was validated by comparing
actual steelmaking datasets on the main carbon steel grade of
SS400 and reconfirmed with A615 and S355 carbon steel
grades. Through a quantitative analysis using sensitivity and
qualitative analysis on the estimation model, the estimation
model and influential variables of slag foaming height and the
basic approach to control slag foaming are discussed in terms
of data science. The results of the work show the potential
applications in the recent advances of information technology
to steelmaking that can promote significant energy savings
and cost-efficiency.
2. Dataset
2.1. System configuration
A 140-ton twin-shell DC-EAF is considered in this work. This
system consists of two vessels operating alternately. During
the idle time of one vessel, scrap is preheated using the off-gas
from the operating vessel resulting in considerable energy
savings compared to conventional EAF’s [38]. A schematic of
one of the EAF vessels is shown in Fig. 1.
The slag foaming height is measured in 2 Hz with an in-
direct measurement method using vibration sensors. Three
vibration sensors attached to the outer shell of the EAF mea-
sures the vibrations. The measured slag foaming height is
subsequently calibrated using the observed height from the
slag gate image, which is evaluated to be accurate by opera-
tors, as shown in Fig. 2.
From a digital camera installed in front of the slag gate, the
slag foaming image is obtained. The subsequent foaming
surface line and baseline are distinguished through image
processing. By comparing the pixels of the preset width line
with the actual width of the slag gate, a transformation matrix
from the image plane to the actual dimension can be deter-
mined. Pixels from the baseline to the foaming surface is then
transformed into the slag foaming height using the trans-
formation matrix. The baseline is set to the bottom of the slag
557
gate and the it is assumed that steel level is 200 mm lower
than baseline based on total production of EAF. The R2 be-
tween the slag foaming height acquired from the vibration
sensors and the image is 0.93, which can be considered sta-
tistically reliable and thus used as the reference data.
2.2. Data pre-processing
The data used in this study consists of 14 million sample
points from 2510 operations, called heats, over 105 days with
298 sensor data at a 2 Hz sampling rate. To reduce the effect of
characteristic differences between vessels of a twin-shell EAF,
sensors, and steel grade, only one vessel and a SS400 grade
was selected from the production. SS400 grades were the most
widely produced from the current facility. After filtering using
these criteria, data pre-processing for 688 heats were con-
ducted, as shown in Fig. 3.
First, data cleaning is done on the raw operation data. The
data cleaning is the process of correcting or removing prob-
lematic data from a dataset. In this study, problematic heats,
when the slag foaming height was not well measured
including sharp drops in the measured values or out of mea-
surement ranges and those measurements showing fixed
values, were removed. As a result, 245 heats with 146 variables
remained.
After data cleaning, the features should be normalized
because the scale range of the values of raw data varies
widely. The normalization makes the networks train faster
and avoid localized optimums. The minemax normalization
method was used, which is the simplest rescaling method, as
shown (3).
xi  minðxÞ
zi ¼ (3)
maxðxÞ  minðxÞ
In multiple regression, multicollinearity is one of the
common problems between explanatory variables. When the
explanatory variables have a linear relation, regressors do not
converge suitably and the model becomes unreliable [49,50].
In the dataset, there are correlated variables with similar
trends. These can cause multicollinearity problems in the
training networks. To resolve this issue, a feature extraction
was done by grouping variables with similar trends. The
558 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8

Fig. 2 e (a) Schematics of Image-based slag foaming measurement method and (b) Slag gate image with preset width line,
detected foaming surface line and baseline.

correlation coefficients between variables are used as a cri- preventing the weights of the networks from training and are
terion for grouping and the variables with the correlation co-
efficient above 0.98 are grouped. Subsequently, the
representative variable of each group was identified and
extracted using the principal component analysis (PCA)
[39,40]. As a result, 36 of the 146 variables were grouped into 11
groups in the dataset, and 11 representative variables from
each group were extracted. Details of these groups, variables
and PCA coefficients for making the representative variables
are given in Appendix A. 121 variables composed of 110 in-
dependent variables and 11 represented variables grouped
from 36 variables are used.
Raw sensor data are typically noisy under normal EAF
operating conditions. If the networks are trained with noisy
data, they do not converge and makes training the model
difficult or impossible. To reduce the noise in the raw data, a
moving average filter, which is the most common noise
filtering method in signal processing, was used. A window size
of 20 was selected, which means that the filter operates by
averaging 20 samples from the input signal. As shown in Fig. 4,
noisy data in Fig.4a and Fig.4c are filtered as Fig.4b and Fig.4d,
respectively.
To train and evaluate the model, the dataset is divided into
three independent subsets: training set, validation set, and
test set. The training set is used for learning. The validation
set is used to tune hyperparameters to avoid overfitting. The
test set is used to evaluate the final model. The subsets are
divided by random selection to follow the same probability
distribution. The percentage of the training set, validation set,
and training set comprising the entire dataset was 70%, 10%,
and 20%, respectively.

3. Estimation model of the slag foaming

height

3.1. Long short-term memory (LSTM)

A neural network is a machine learning technique, which is

known for efficiency and effectiveness when modeling com-
plex relations. A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of
neural networks, where connections between nodes form a
directed cycle, which has the advantage of dealing with
sequential data including time series data or natural language Fig. 3 e Overall flowchart of data pre-processing and
[41e43]. The RNNs suffer from a vanishing gradient problem estimation modeling.
 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8 559

Fig. 4 e Example of noise reduction (a) Carbon jet pressure of EBT raw data (b) denoised data (c) Current raw data (d) denoised
data.

Fig. 5 e Schematic diagrams of the (a) Neural Network (b) Recurrent Neural Network (c) LSTM unit.

unable to handle long-term dependencies. The long short- which information in the cell state is used to compute the
term memory (LSTM) was developed to solve this problem output activation of the LSTM unit.
by modifying the structure of the RNN nodes [44]. The sche- The structure of the LSTM networks used in this study is
matic diagrams of neural network, RNN and LSTM is shown in shown in Fig. 6.
Fig. 5.
In addition to the hidden state of conventional RNNs, LSTM
consists of a cell state ct to memorize past information and
three regulators, called gates, to protect and control the cell Table 1 e Test set results.
state. The three gates are the input, output, and forget gates. Benchmark RMSE R2 Correlation coefficient
The forget gate determines which information remains in the Mean 42.3 0.905 0.963
cell state. The input gate determines which new information Best RMSE 23.1 0.957 0.981
to be stored in the cell state. The output gate determines Best R2 23.6 0.982 0.991
Best Correlation 23.6 0.982 0.991
560 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8

Fig. 6 e LSTM networks structure.

Fig. 7 e Results of the best RMSE (Heat No. 7 in test set) (a) time-slag foaming height (b) measured-estimated.

The input vector contains 121 features with 20 timesteps.
The hidden layers consist of three LSTM layers and parallel
dense layers. The parallel dense layers consist of one dense
layer and three dense layers followed by a concatenation
operator and an output dense layer. The purpose of a multi-
layer LSTM is to learn more sophisticated conditional
distribution of sequential data. Each layer has 20 LSTM mod-
ules with 20 timesteps, which is defined as the look-back. The
parallel dense layers are used for multiple feature extraction.
The activation function of the parallel dense layers is a hy-
perbolic tangent function. Following the parallel dense layers,
the output vectors of each layer are concatenated into a single

Fig. 8 e Results of the best R2 (Heat No. 17 in test set) (a) time-slag foaming height (b) measured-estimated.
 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8 561

Fig. 9 e Results of approximately mean performance metrics (Heat No. 33 in test set) (a) time-slag foaming height (b)
measured-estimated.

Fig. 10 e Results of the best R2 of A615 (a) time-slag foaming height (b) measured-estimated.

vector. The last dense layer is added to obtain the output with
a linear activation function. Dropout is a widely used tech-
nique to prevent overfitting. 200 Dropouts are arranged be-
tween layers with a 10% dropout rate.
The loss function for training is defined as the mean square
error of the estimated value as follows:
1 X
N
2 better accuracy in the model. The second metric is a correla-
l¼ ð xbi  xÞ
N i
3.2. Estimation results
The trained networks are tested using the test set data. To
validate the performance of the model, three types of corre-
sponding performance metrics are used in this study. The first
metric is root mean square error (RMSE). RMSE directly eval-
uates the estimation accuracy. A smaller RMSE corresponds to
(4)
tion coefficient, which showed the similarity between the

where xbi is the estimated value and x is the reference value. A

RMSprop was used to optimize the training network with r ¼
0:9. We applied an exponential decay to the learning rate with
Table 2 e Mean values of the benchmarks for steel grade.
an initial learning rate of 0.001 that decreases 0.8 times per
every epoch. The networks were trained for 17 epochs and the Steel grade RMSE R2 Correlation coefficient
scheme was implemented using Python and TensorFlow. SS400 42.3 0.905 0.962
A615 66.2 0.810 0.933
S355 60.8 0.803 0.933
562 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8

Fig. 11 e Results of the best R2 of S355 (a) time-slag foaming height (b) measured-estimated.

trends of the two data. When a value was higher than 0.9, the
two data can be assumed to exhibit very similar trends [45].
The last metric is a coefficient of determination (R2), which is
the degree to which one datum describes another. In a pre-
vious study, a model can be considered satisfactory, when the
value is higher than 0.65 [46,47].
The results of the estimation model using the corre-
sponding performance 220 metrics are summarized in Table 1.
The mean value of R2 was over 0.9 and the mean value of the
correlation coefficient was over 0.96. Therefore, the model can
be assumed to be reliable.
Fig. 7e9 show the comparison between the measured data
and the estimated data of the test results.
Three results show estimation performances of heats 225
scoring the best RMSE, the R2 and approximately mean values
in benchmarks, respectively. As shown in Figs. 7e9, the trend
of the estimated data of three different heats follows well the
measured data.
The developed model was only trained on SS400 steel
grade. In order to evaluate the general applicability to other
steel grades, data consisting of 54 heats for A615 and 30 heats
for S355 steel grade were also applied to the developed model
showing similar results suggesting the broader applicability of
the present model. Mean values of the benchmarks for each
steel grade are shown in Table 2.
Although the benchmarks are lower than those of SS400,
they satisfy the benchmark standards. As shown in Fig. 10 and
Fig. 11, the overall trends of the estimated slag foaming height
follow the measured slag foaming height, but errors do occur
in specific regions.
It is speculated that the errors are caused due to the
different compositions in the steel grades. It is expected that
the performance can be improved to a similar level to the

Fig. 12 e Schematic diagram of sensitivity analysis process.

 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8 563

Table 3 e 20 most influential variables by sensitivity.

Rank Influential variable during whole heat Influential variable during refining period
1 Electrical energy during the second melting period Electrical energy during the refining period
2 Amount of oxygen inflow of lance manipulator Total carbon injection quantity
3 Total carbon injection quantity Carbon jet WCL pressure
4 Tilt angle of furnace Representative variable of PCA group #10
(Oxygen main flow rate)
5 Charge hopper Oxygen flow rate of lance manipulator
6 Carbon jet #1 pressure Carbon jet #3 pressure
7 Electrical energy during the refining period Booster fan duct temperature
8 Height of arc Total oxygen flow rate
9 Representative variable of PCA group #6 (Electric power) Carbon jet #1 pressure
10 Oxygen flow rate of lance manipulator Charge hopper
11 Booster fan duct temperature Representative variable of PCA group #8 (Electrode voltage)
12 Representative variable of PCA group #10 (Oxygen main flow rate) Tilt angle of furnace
13 Oxygen flow rate of burner #1 Amount of oxygen inflow of lance manipulator
14 Carbon jet #3 pressure Gas flow rate of EBT
15 Gas flow rate of EBT Weight of carbon dispenser #2
16 Oxygen flow rate of burner #2 Weight of supplementary material #3
17 Representative variable of PCA group #11 (Electrical energy total) thermoelectric device’s lava-steel temperature
18 Representative variable of PCA group #7 Weight of supplementary material #5
(Electric power system 22 KV)
19 DC-current Combustion tower #1 temperature
20 Weight of supplementary material #3 Dust collector duct pressure

existing developed model through a transfer learning enabling known. To quantitatively analyze the model, it is necessary to
fast training with small additional dataset [28]. quantify the influence of input variables. Sensitivity-based
pruning (SBP) is one of the analysis methods on the influ-
ence of the input variables in neural networks [48]. The in-
4. Sensitivity analysis fluences of the input variables are indirectly derived through
SBP and the most influential factor can be obtained. SBP
4.1. Sensitivity-based pruning (SBP) evaluates the mean square error (MSE), when the influence of
an input variable is removed. The removal of the influence of
The estimation model using neural networks is a black box the input is modeled by replacing an input vector with its
model, where the influence of the input variables cannot be

Fig. 13 e Time series data comparing slag foaming height with (a) electrical energy consumption and (b) the representative
variable of PCA group 8.
564 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8

Fig. 14 e Time series data comparing slag foaming height with (a) total carbon injection quantity (b) carbon jet WCL pressure
(c) carbon jet #3 pressure (d) carbon jet #1 pressure (e) weight of carbon dispenser #2.
 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8 565

Fig. 15 e Time series data comparing slag foaming height with (a) representative variable of PCA group 10 (b) oxygen flow
rate of lance manipulator (c) total oxygen flow rate (d) amount of oxygen inflow of lance manipulator.

mean value. The schematic diagram of the SBP process is Sensitivity analysis suggests that variables related to
shown in Fig. 12. electricity, including current and power, oxygen, carbon, and
N subsets removing the influence of one of the input var- temperature are influential. Influences of each variable will be
iables are generated from the dataset. The MSE’s are calcu- discussed in Section 5.
lated by comparing the original result with the results of
subsets computed over trained networks. The MSE’s show the
influence of the input variables. 5. Discussion

4.2. Results of sensitivity-based pruning
Sensitivity analysis is conducted using the proposed estima-
tion model to identify the influence of variables, especially,
the refining period is major concern for slag foaming. As a
result, the 20 most influential variables of the slag foaming
height during whole heat and refining period were derived, as
shown in Table 3.
In this section, we will discuss the relations of each variable
through the developed model in terms of metallurgical anal-
ysis as well as data science. Because slag is mainly generated
and foamed during the refining period, we focused on influ-
ential variables through the sensitivity analysis during the
refining period in Table 3. The influential variables derived
from the sensitivity analysis can be categorized into elec-
tricity, carbon, oxygen, and others. The effect of each variable
566 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8
is analyzed by comparing these categories of variables with
the slag foaming height.
5.1. Electrical energy consumption correlated to the slag
foaming
Electricity is the main heating source of the EAF. The
electricity-related variables in dataset are composed of elec-
trical energy, voltage, electric current. Among those variables,
electrical energy during the refining period and representative
variable of PCA group 8, composed of voltage measured at
electrode, are influential. In case of voltage measured at
electrode, trend of voltage during the refining period follows
the slag foaming height and voltage gets stable when slag is
foamed during the refining period as shown in Fig. 13b. It can
be interpreted that the voltage is stabilized by slag foaming
covering the electrodes. Because of relation, slag foaming
height can be indirectly estimated. This phenomenon can be
explained as a result rather than the cause of slag foaming.
Therefore, electricity-related variables can be related but not
be independent variables.
5.2. Carbon-related variables correlated to the slag
foaming
Carbon is a major factor that causes slag foaming as
mentioned in Section 1. The carbon-related variables in
dataset are carbon injection quantity, carbon jet pressure and
weight of carbon dispenser. Those variables are all influential.
The carbon is loaded on the carbon dispenser and injected by
carbon jet. As carbon is injected, pressure of the carbon jet
increases and weight of carbon dispenser decreases. Those
relations can be shown in Fig. 14. Trends of carbon jet #1 and
#3 pressure follows slag foaming height. The pressure of car-
bon jets can be independent variable of the slag foaming
height.
5.3. Oxygen-related variables correlated to the slag
foaming
Oxygen is also an influential factor that causes slag
foaming. Oxygen injectors are placed at virtual lance
burner (VLB), external bottom tapping (EBT) and lance
manipulator. The oxygen-related variables in dataset are
flow rate, pressure and amount of oxygen inflow. Among
those variables, representative variable of PCA group 10
composed of oxygen flow rate of VLB and EBT, oxygen flow
rate of lance manipulator, total oxygen flow rate, and
amount of oxygen inflow of lance manipulator are influ-
ential. Fig. 15 shows timeeseries plot of oxygen-related
influential variables. During the melting period, oxygen is
injected through burner as heat source, and slag is gener-
ated as scrap is melted. During the refining period, oxygen
is injected and foams slag. Especially, oxygen injected from
lance manipulator and injected carbon in refining period
generate slag foaming explosively.
These influential variables derived through sensitivity
analysis of the estimation model can be explained by metal-
lurgy. This means that the estimation model reflects real
environment well and can be used as a soft sensor in a real-
world environment. To apply for controlling the slag foam-
ing in the real steelmaking process, quantitative studies on
the influences of the variables considered as independent
variables, especially carbon and oxygen, and proper control
algorithm are required. We will cover the quantitative study
for control in future works.
6. Conclusion
In this research, we developed an estimation model of slag
foaming height in the EAF steelmaking process by means of
neural networks using pre-processed EAF heats dataset.
The reference data of the slag foaming height were
measured by indirect measurement method using vibration
sensors. Slag foaming height is non-linear and sequential;
thus, LSTM networks are used. The estimation model is
evaluated by performance metrics; RMSE, R2 and correlation
coefficient. As shown in the results, the estimation model
scored satisfactorily consistent performance metrics.
Consequently, the model can be considered reliable and
well-learned.
Sensitivity analysis on the estimation model derived the
most influential factors of the slag foaming height. The results
showed the influential variables were variables related to
electricity, carbon, oxygen and others. We discussed the re-
lations between those variables and the slag foaming. The
carbon, and oxygen can have a causal influence on the slag
foaming, which is seen through data. This result is already
well-known in metallurgy, which means that the estimation
model is well-learned and capable of being adopted in a real-
world environment.
In the future research, a quantitative study on the influ-
ential variables is required, especially in the case of oxygen
and carbon, which have a significant influence on the slag
foaming height and affect the quality of steel such as the
amount of carbon concentration. This further research would
be extremely helpful in gaining insights into how to better
control the slag foaming height in the EAF steelmaking
process.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing
financial interests or personal relationships that could have
appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Korea Institute of Energy
Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) and Ministry of
Trade, Industry & Energy (MOTIE) of the Republic of Korea (No.
20172010400170). This work was supported by the National
Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea
government(MSIT) (2018R1A4A1025986).
 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8 567

Table A.8 e PCA group 8.

Appendix A. PCA groups
Variable PCA coefficient
In Table A.1eA.11, correlation coefficient groups used in PCA SV2089B voltage 0.7073
as follow: Electric master reference voltage 0.7069

Table A.1 e PCA group 1. Table A.9 e PCA group 9.

Variable PCA coefficient Variable PCA coefficient
B/F Motor R-phase winding temperature 0.5800 GPT tertiary R-phase voltage #1 0.4472
B/F Motor S-phase winding temperature 0.5815 GPT tertiary S-phase voltage #1 0.4472
B/F Motor T-phase winding temperature 0.5705 GPT tertiary T-phase voltage #1 0.4472
GPT tertiary R-phase voltage #2 0.4472
GPT tertiary S-phase voltage #2 0.4472

Table A.2 e PCA group 2.

Variable PCA coefficient
Table A.10 e PCA group 10.
TI2005B-1 bottom plate temperature 0.6997
TI2005B-3 bottom plate temperature 0.7144 Variable PCA coefficient
Oxygen main flow rate VLB#1 0.4932
Oxygen main flow rate VLB#2 0.4991
Oxygen main flow rate VLB#3 0.5268
Table A.3 e PCA group 3. Oxygen main flow rate EBT 0.4796

Variable PCA coefficient

Operation pattern voltage setting 0.7071
DC voltage setting 0.7071 Table A.11 e PCA group 11.
Variable PCA coefficient
Electric energy 0.3890
Table A.4 e PCA group 4. Total integration of oxygen VLB#1 0.3799
Total integration of oxygen VLB#2 0.3774
Variable PCA coefficient
Total integration of oxygen VLB#3 0.3790
Operation pattern current setting 0.7071 Total integration of oxygen EBT 0.3647
DC current setting 0.7071 22 KV valid first electric energy 0.3860
22 KV invalid first electric energy 0.3723

Table A.5 e PCA group 5.

references
Variable PCA coefficient
First current 0.4477
DC current #1 0.4473 [1] MacRosty RD, Swartz CL. Dynamic modeling of an industrial
DC current #2 0.4474 electric arc furnace. Ind Eng Chem Res 2005;44(21):8067e83.
DC current #3 0.4467 [2] Lee B, Sohn I. Review of innovative energy savings
Total DC current 0.4470 technology for the electric arc furnace. JOM (J Occup Med)
2014;66(9):1581e94.
[3] Anderson C. Pyrometallurgy. In: Reference module in
materials science and materials engineering. Elsevier; 2016.
Table A.6 e PCA group 6.
[4] Nassaralla C. Pyrometallurgy. In: Buschow KJ, Cahn RW,
Variable PCA coefficient Flemings MC, Ilschner B, Kramer EJ, Mahajan S, et al., editors.
Encyclopedia of materials: science and technology. Oxford:
First electric power 0.7077
Elsevier; 2001. p. 7938e41.
DC electric power 0.7066
[5] Trejo E, Martell F, Micheloud O, Teng L, Llamas A,
Montesinos- Castellanos A. A novel estimation of electrical
and cooling losses in electric arc furnaces. Energy
Table A.7 e PCA group 7. 2012;42(1):446e56.
[6] Almeida RA Md, Vieira D, Bielefeldt WV, Vilela ACF. Slag
Variable PCA coefficient foaming fundamentals-a critical assessment. Mater Res
Electric power system 22 KV valid electric 0.7315 2017;20(2):474e80.
power [7] Liukkonen M, Penttil K, Koukkari a, P. A compilation of slag
Electric power system 22 KV invalid 0.6818 foaming phenomenon research: theoretical studies,
electric power industrial experiments and modelling. Finland: VTT
Technology, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland; 2012.
568 j o u r n a l o f m a t e r i a l s r e s e a r c h a n d t e c h n o l o g y 2 0 2 1 ; 1 2 : 5 5 5 e5 6 8
[8] Ghosh A, Chatterjee A. Iron making and steelmaking: theory
and practice. PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd.; 2008.
[9] Ito K, Fruehan R. Study on the foaming of cao-sio 2-feo slags:
Part i. foaming parameters and experimental results.
Metallurgical transactions B 1989;20(4):509e14.
[10] Chychko A, Teng L, Seetharaman S. Energy saving effect of
slag foaming by carbonate additions in eaf process. Arch
Metall Mater 2010;55(4):1089e95.
[11] Wilson EL, Karr CL, Bennett JP. An adaptive, intelligent
control system for slag foaming. Appl Intell
2004;20(2):165e77.
[12] Megahed G, Fathy A, Morsy M, Abdelaziz E. Improving eaf
performance by chemical energy optimisation at ezz flat
steel. Ironmak Steelmak 2010;37(6):445e51.
[13] Wei G, Zhu R, Yang S, Hu S, Yang L, Chen F. Carbon powder
mixed injection with a shrouding supersonic oxygen jet in
electric arc furnace steelmaking. Metall Mater Trans B
2020;51(5):2298e308.
[14] Heo JH, Park JH. Assessment of physicochemical properties
of electrical arc furnace slag and their effects on foamability.
Metall Mater Trans B 2019;50(6):2959e68.
[15] Huang X-A, Ng KW, Giroux L, Duchesne M. Carbonaceous
material properties and their interactions with slag during
electric arc furnace steelmaking. Metall Mater Trans B
2019;50(3):1387e98.
[16] Lu Q. Computational design of heat resistant steels with
evolving and time-independent strengthening factors. 2015.
[17] Jiang R, Fruehan R. Slag foaming in bath smelting.
Metallurgical transactions B 1991;22(4):481e9.
[18] Matsuura H, Fruehan RJ. Slag foaming in an electric arc
furnace. ISIJ Int 2009;49(10):1530e5.
[19] Kim HS, Min DJ, Park JH. Foaming behavior of cao-sio2-feo-
mgosatd-x (x¼ al2o3, mno, p2o5, and caf2) slags at high
temperatures. ISIJ Int 2001;41(4):317e24.
[20] Corbari R, Matsuura H, Halder S, Walker M, Fruehan RJ.
Foaming and the rate of the carbon-iron oxide reaction in
slag. Metall Mater Trans B 2009;40(6):940.
[21] Jeong JJ, Ban SJ, Kim SW. Estimation of slag foaming height
from vibration signals in electric arc furnaces. In: ECTI-
CON2010: the 2010 ECTI international confernce on electrical
engineering/electronics, computer, telecommunications and
information technology, IEEE; 2010. p. 866e9.
[22] Aula M, Heikkil A, Iljana a, M, Sipola T, Visuri V-V. Steel
industry - what they measure and how?. 2014. 10.
[23] Matschullat T, Rieger D, Dittmer B, Kruger K, D obbeler A,
Mees H. Results of foaming slag and scrap meltdown control
simelt csm/fsm based on structure-borne sound in electric
arc furnace operation. In: Proc. AIS- tech conf; 2012.
p. 2577e90.
[24] Jansen T, Kru ger K, Schliephake H, Dettmer B, Schlinge L.
Advanced foaming slag control. In: 10th European electric
steelmaking conference; 2012.
[25] Zhang Y, Fruehan R. Effect of carbonaceous particles on slag
foaming. Metall Mater Trans B 1995;26(4):813e9.
[26] Wu L, Albertsson GJ, Sichen D. Modelling of slag foaming.
Ironmak Steelmak 2010;37(8):612e9.
[27] Lotun D, Pilon L. Physical modeling of slag foaming for
various operating conditions and slag compositions. ISIJ Int
2005;45(6):835e40.
[28] Torrey L, Shavlik J. Transfer learning. In: Handbook of
research on machine learning applications and trends:
algorithms, methods, and techniques, IGI global; 2010.
p. 242e64.
[29] Buydens J, Nyssen P, Marique C, Salamone P. The dynamic
control of the slag foaming operation in the electric arc
furnace. Rev Me tall 1998;95(4):501e10.
[30] Shang C, You F. Data analytics and machine learning for
smart process manufacturing: recent advances and
perspectives in the big data era. Engineering
2019;5(6):1010e6.
[31] Rehman S, Mohandes M. Artificial neural network estimation
of global solar radiation using air temperature and relative
humidity. Energy Pol 2008;36(2):571e6.
[32] Wang L, Scott KA, Xu L, Clausi DA. Sea ice concentration
estimation during melt from dual-pol sar scenes using deep
convolutional neural networks: a case study. IEEE Trans
Geosci Rem Sens 2016;54(8):4524e33.
[33] Kadlec P, Gabrys B, Strandt S. Data-driven soft sensors in
the process industry. Comput Chem Eng
2009;33(4):795e814.
[34] Hinton PR. Statistics explained. Routledge; 2014.
[35] Yuan M, Zhou P, Li M-l, Li R-f, Wang H, Chai T-y. Intelligent
multivariable modeling of blast furnace molten iron quality
based on dynamic aga-ann and pca. Journal of Iron and Steel
Research International 2015;22(6):487e95.
[36] Yuan P, Mao Z-z, Wang F-l. Endpoint prediction of eaf based
on multiple support vector machines. Journal of Iron and
Steel Research International 2007;14(2):20e4.
[37] Lee J, Kim J, Hwang H, Son K, Jeon W, Kim Y, et al. Modeling
of slag foaming height of electric arc furnace using stepwise
regression analysis. Metallurgical Research & Technology
2020;117(1):114.
[38] Trenkler H. Energy-saving dc twin shell arc furnace for
melting low-grade scrap. Iron Steel Rev 1997;40(8):51e6.
[39] Shlens J. A tutorial on principal component analysis. arXiv;
2014. preprint arXiv:1404.1100.
[40] Jolliffe I. Principal component analysis. Springer; 2011.
[41] Ogunmolu O, Gu X, Jiang S, Gans N. Nonlinear systems
identification using deep dynamic neural networks. arXiv;
2016. preprint arXiv:1610.01439.
[42] Graves A, Mohamed A-r, Hinton G. Speech recognition with
deep recurrent neural networks. In: 2013 IEEE international
conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing. IEEE;
2013. p. 6645e9.
[43] Mikolov T, Karafia 
 t M, Burget L, Cernocký J, Khudanpur S.
Recurrent neural network based language model. In:
INTERSPEECH; 2010. p. 1045e8.
[44] Hochreiter S, Schmidhuber J. Long short-term memory.
Neural Comput 1997;9(8):1735e80.
[45] Mukaka MM. A guide to appropriate use of correlation
coefficient in medical research. Malawi Med J
2012;24(3):69e71.
[46] Hair JF, Ringle CM, Sarstedt M. Pls-sem: indeed a silver bullet.
J Market Theor Pract 2011;19(2):139e52.
[47] Hair Jr JF, Hult GTM, Ringle C, Sarstedt M. A primer on partial
least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Sage
publications; 2016.
[48] Macas M, Moretti F, Lauro F, Pizzuti S, Annunziato M, Fonti A,
et al. Importance of feature selection for recurrent neural
network based forecasting of building thermal comfort. In:
International conference on adaptive and intelligent
systems, springer; 2014. p. 11e9.
[49] Farrar DE, Glauber RR. Multicollinearity in regression
analysis: the problem revisited. Rev Econ Stat
1967;49(1):92e107.
[50] Erkoc A, Tez M, Akay KU. On multicollinearity in nonlinear
regression models, SelcUK journal of applied mathematics.
Special Issue 2010:65e72.