Emerging Role of the Mechatronic Design of Industrial Systems for the Material Processing Technology

Design and construction of complex systems are probably one of the most challenging issues of the current industrial technology. Those activities may concern either very complex products, like rail and motor vehicles, aircrafts and spacecrafts, microsystems and nanodevices, or even industrial equipments used for manufacturing those products, as in the material processing technology. Complexity may arise from the number of components but even from some coupling effect which is applied to operate such systems. In the material processing technology coupling consists either of the interaction or the superposition of several phenomena, which make rather difficult the design activity and the process control. Several interactions are often occurring during the material processing. Electromagnetic behaviour, fluid dynamics, structural mechanics and thermodynamics are typically involved and an energy conversion among those fields is performed. More and more the actions related to those fields need to be controlled by some automatic system, with a relevant contribution of the electronic engineering and the computer science. Resorting to the so–called ‘multiphysics approach’ in the numerical prediction of the system behaviour has been almost compulsory in those cases since long time. Nevertheless, only recently a comprehensive and mechatronic approach was really implemented to take care of all the design parameters and of the different kinds of energy, being converted to activate several functions and to allow the system operation. Steelmaking plant is a very interesting example of the material processing because of the number of subsystems currently used to support the whole process. This technology is currently growing up fairly fast thanks to a wider use of the mechatronic approach, since the early concept and design of the product development. This chapter provides an overview upon some examples of the integration among different physical models through some numerical tools being currently performed in the industrial systems engineering as it is applied to the steelmaking process and some challenging issues of the application of mechatronics.