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Energy analyses in the metallurgical sector traditionally focus on upstream processes such as steelmaking and refining. However, when energy consumption is evaluated at the level of individual products, downstream manufacturing stages can represent a significant share of the total energy demand. This study investigates the energy flow associated with the manufacturing of a large forged steam turbine shaft using industrial production data from a European forging facility.The analysis covers the complete manufacturing route of the shaft, including electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking, casting, reheating, forging, multiple heat treatment stages, machining operations and final heat stability testing. The results reveal that downstream thermal operations dominate the energy profile of the finished shaft, with heat stability testing identified as one of the main contributors to the overall energy demand, followed by reheating and heat treatment stages. In contrast, upstream steelmaking represents a relatively minor contribution when energy demand is allocated to the final product.These findings demonstrate that analysing energy flow at product level changes the identification of energy hotspots compared with plant-level assessments. The results highlight the importance of optimising downstream thermal operations, furnace utilisation and process scheduling to improve the energy efficiency of forged component manufacturing and support ongoing decarbonisation efforts in the steel industry.
Keywords: Energy flow analysis, forged steel manufacturing, downstream thermal processes, energy hotspot analysis, heat stability testing© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.