The CIRCULAR PIT has identified different needs from the interviews and visits to the different potential customers of the future solution. Those needs have been included in several different-use cases in a range of sectors, such as steelmaking, waste recovery and reuse, and waste managers, and always according to the 2030 Agenda goals.

Within the steel sector, a need has been identified to optimise the casting process thanks to traceability and controlling yield loss.

The problems when it comes to managing and recovering waste for reuse are the presence of foreign materials and the optimisation of the PCI to reduce the energy needs to maintain the temperature gradients of the furnace.

The proposed solution is based on the sensorisation of the elements of the process, the use of artificial vision for image capture and wave spectra for waste characterisation. Training models based on Artificial Intelligence will be proved with process knowledge to classify and identify materials of the process. Finally, the process will be fully digitalised thanks to data capture, storage, visualisation and analysis.

During this year, the vision sensors required for the aforementioned use cases will be designed and developed.

Project Consortium:

The Circular PIT project consortium is made up of the Basque Maritime Forum as project leader and coordinator, Aclima, the Basque Environment Cluster, CredeBlug and Vi4Crane, and the Gaiker technology centre.

The Circular PIT project is financed by the Innovative Business Clusters (AEI) Support Programme of the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism, by means of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Mechanism financed by the European Union – Next Generation EU.