The Regional Championship took place online for a 24-hour period on 17 December 2014. This year’s steelChallenge attracted 1,566 teams and 1,922 participants representing 34 countries. There were 83,000 attempts with the basic oxygen steelmaking simulation, an increase of 73% compared to last year. 811 teams successfully completed at least one run of the simulation and 10,500 successful runs were completed. 
 
The new Regional Champions in the ‘Industry’ and ‘Student’ categories will be invited with expenses paid to compete for the title of World Champion in Brussels in February 2015. They will compete in the presence of leaders of the global steel industry. All Regional Champions will be awarded certificates, cash prizes and an iPad in addition to their trip to Brussels. The World Champions in both categories will also be awarded a World Champion certificate, an additional cash prize and the steelChallenge trophy. Total prizes for steelChallenge-9 are €43,000.
 
The entrants were challenged to create steel at the lowest total cost and required quality for a construction application, using the basic oxygen steelmaking method, in a simulation on steeluniversity.org.
 
The Regional Champions are: 

Student Category
Region	Team Members	Affiliation	Country
North and South America	Emiliano Buhlman Tomas Aagaard	Universidad Nacional del Sur	Argentina
Europe/CIS/Africa/Middle East	Patricia Jovicevic Klug	Christian Albrechts University of Kiel	Germany
Asia and Oceania	Dahee Cho	Seoul National University	South Korea
China	Yongping Wei Yongxu Wang	Chongqing University of Science and Technology	China
Industry Category
Region	Team Members	Affiliation	Country
North and South America	Rodrigo Ramos Francisco Necy Alves	Gerdau S.A. SENAI/CE	Brazil
Europe/CIS/Africa/Middle East	Ghassan Ghazal Leandro Dijon de Oliveira Campos	ArcelorMittal	France
Asia and Oceania	Ting-Min Wu William Hsiao	China Steel Corp. Dragon Steel	Taiwan, China
China	Wang Ye	Ningbo Steel	China

For more information on the challenge, click here.