IoT endows new philosophy with stainless steel

In 2020, the production of China's stainless steel reached 30.14 million tons, an increase of 740,000 tons from the previous year. China's share of global stainless steel production rose to 59.2 percent in 2020 from 56.3 percent in 2019, according to the data released by the International Stainless Steel Forum.

As a bellwether of China's stainless steel industry, Wuxi in East China's Jiangsu province has been continuing its expansion of both upstream and downstream industrial chains for more than two decades.

In the course of business operations, the production mode, quality and price of the stainless steel vary from each other.

In order to give full play to the application of cutting-edge stainless steel science and technology, build a standard system in line with international standards, as well as effectively help industrial integration, the group standard of the stainless steel industry in Jiangsu province was officially put into pilot implementation on Nov 20.

"What we call the industrial order is built upon the group standard," said Yang Hanliang, president of the Wuxi Stainless Steel Association. "Wuxi should be the place to launch this standardization because the trading volume of stainless steel in Wuxi makes up 40 percent of the nation's total. As much turnover as the number brought, so did the responsibility.

"This will be a milestone both in and outside the stainless steel industry and its influence will be far-reaching, from Wuxi to Jiangsu and even further," Yang added.

"After the release of the group standard, we will have a unified standard for the industry," said Zhang Xuezhu, co-founder of Fansheng Stainless Steel, one of the member corporations of the Wuxi Stainless Steel Association. "I have been engaged in the stainless steel industry for years and now I'm glad to see the industry becoming more normative."

IoT provides a smart brain for the traditional stainless steel industry, allowing the flow of data that would otherwise exist within each enterprise. It provides a guaranteed mechanism for information security, a controllable and even personalized real-time online monitoring system, as well as a traceability workflow.

In the just-concluded World IoT Expo 2021, the latest IoT application scenarios centering on 5G communication, industrial internet, smart cities, smart education, as well as virtual reality made their debuts. The stainless steel industry specification under the IoT standard is intended to establish an industrial order for the stainless steel industry.