In an announcement, the companies said the application, Mechanical Properties Variability, is designed to address the challenges associated with the variability of mechanical properties in steel production, particularly with advanced grades. 

“As steel industry margins continue to shrink, one promising way for manufacturers to increase profitability is to pursue more advanced, high-strength steel production for applications such as automotive and electrical. However, production of these advanced steel grades requires much tighter control of the overall production process, which is impacted by numerous parameters across the mill,” the companies said. 

“The application senses patterns within mill data to fully understand the drivers of mechanical property variability. It then predicts when increased variability will occur and recommends the optimal input parameters required to optimize target mechanical properties such as yield strength, tensile strength, and elongation.”

Noodle and SMS announced their partnership in June 2019, saying that they would collaborate on an effort to optimize operations at shared customer Big River Steel. Indeed, Big River is already making use of the application and anticipates cost savings of US$2 million annually. 

"Our ability to deploy AI to produce steel with tighter tolerances allows us to address the requirements of high margin segments such as automotive and electrical, which immediately impacts our top line revenues in addition to the obvious cost savings," said Denis Hennessy, Big River's director of product development.