Presentation Title: Innovation and Technological Transformation in Ironmaking at ArcelorMittal

Dennis Lu was born and raised in China. He received his B. Sc. degree in Ironmaking and Steelmaking at Northeast University. Dennis obtained his Ph.D. degree in Materials Science and Engineering at McMaster University in 1992.  Upon his graduation, Dennis, working with others, developed and marketed software for operating and cost analysis for ironmaking to most of blast furnaces in U.S. and Canada.  He joined Hoogovens (Daniels-Corus) as a process engineer to provide technical services and engineering studies for North American ironmaking industry.  From 1999 to 2004, Dennis joined USS/Kobe Steel as a process technology and quality assurance manager overseeing the primary operations.  Under Dennis’ leadership, non-leaded steel was invented for free-machining steel.  In 2004 to 2007, Dennis became a plant consultant III of blast furnace engineering and technology at USS, Gary Works.  In 2007, Dennis joined as a process engineer of ironmaking at the former AM IH plant.  Dennis joined AM Global R&D East Chicago (RDEC) as a senior research engineer in 2009, became a lead research engineer in 2015 and was promoted to Scientist in 2023, providing technical support and developing and deploying R&D solutions for the ironmaking communities in AM. In 2020, Dennis joined AM Global R&D Software Factory (RDSF) taking the lead in improving and deploying our BF Sachem® expert system. Recently, he was also mandated to participate in the design of our new DRI Ecosystem.

Dennis has developed over the past few years a dual skill both in Modelling our processes by developing and improving models and making them available on our industrial platforms, and in Digitalization by having a good understanding of our global on-premises architectures and cloud, and by testing and applying new ML and AI algorithms for signal prediction and product classification.