Vizag Steel Plant successfully commissions new bloom & round combi-caster from SMS Concast
Increased productivity with new continuous caster
RINL’s (Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Ltd.) Visakhapatnam Steel Plant (VSP) has successfully commissioned the new continuous casting machine in Visakhapatnam, India, which was supplied by SMS Concast, a company of SMS group.
With a casting radius of twelve meters, the five-strand continuous casting machine has a rated capacity of one million tons per year, covering a wide range of steel grades from simple carbon grades to grades for ball bearing and seamless tube applications as well as railway wheels.
The new continuous casting machine is enlarging the product range of Vizag Steel by introducing round bloom sections of 410 and 450 millimeters in diameter in addition to the 200 millimeters square sections. The smoothly commissioned casting machine encompasses all technological features required to produce steel grades for highest quality demands, including a submerged pouring system with electro-mechanical stopper flow control system, hydraulic mold oscillation, mold and final electromagnetic stirrers as well as a product marking system.
The state-of-the-art Level 1 and Level 2 automation systems ensure efficient operation of the continuous casting machine with minimized personnel requirements, while controlling and monitoring all required process parameters and capturing all key product data for digital production and quality tracking.
With this new state-of-the-art equipment, Vizag Steels will be able to further strengthen its position in the Special Bar Quality (SBQ) market.
“Thanks to the very successful cooperation with SMS Concast, we now operate a continuous casting machine of the latest technology specifically designed to meet our high quality standards,” says Mr. P.C. Mohapatra - Director (Projects) at Vizag Steels.
SMS group is a group of companies internationally active in plant construction and mechanical engineering for the steel and nonferrous metals industry. It has some 13,500 employees who generate worldwide sales of more than EUR 3 billion. The sole owner of the holding company SMS GmbH is the Familie Weiss Foundation.