In late October, Chinese steel producer Beihai Chengde Stainless Steel Co. (Beihai Chengde) achieved their full reduction program on their new Power X-HI 3-stand mill on HRAPL#5, exceeding 60 % reduction on 304 grades with white coil process, 55 % on series 200 black coil process. Subsequently, Beihai Chengde awarded Primetals Technologies with the Preliminary Acceptance certificate for the TCM only six months after rolling mill start-up. The 3-stand continuous tandem cold mill (TCM) was supplied to the Beihai plant in Guangxi Province. The rolling mill has a rated capacity of 600,000 tons of cold strip per year and is designed to produce 300 and 200 series steels as white and black coils. It is the first application of a Power X-HI mill for the direct processing of stainless black coils. The new mill relieves the hot rolling mill and allows additional thickness reduction. Mill has been in operation since mid-2019.
The company is using the new cold rolling mill to produce wider strip. The continuous rolling mill handles hot-rolled, black stainless steel. It is able to achieve exit thicknesses from 0.8 to 5.5 millimeters from entry thicknesses of between 2.0 and 8.0 millimeters. The width of the strip varies between 1,000 and 1,550 millimeters. Primetals Technologies was responsible for the complete engineering, the manufacture of key-components, the overall technical coordination, as well as supervision of erection and commissioning.
The rolling speed is 200 meters per minute. The scope of supply also included variable-speed drives with a total power of approximately 10,000 kilowatts, and the basic (level 1) and process (level 2) automation. An HMI-solution handles operator control and monitoring tasks. It also enables distributed supervision and features easy-to-use diagnostic and alarm functions. Beihai Chengde is active in nickel mining and the production of narrow stainless steel strip. It already operates a 5-stand Power X-HI continuous TCM with heavy laser welder supplied by Primetals Technologies, which produced the first coil at the end of 2015.
X-HI ® is a registered trademark of Primetals Technologies in certain countries.
