steel news

By end of February, Primetals Technologies received an order for the installation of a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for Gerdau’s integrated plant melt shop in Ouro Branco, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The new solution will replace an existing system, which offers only limited upgrade options after several years of operation. The project will be executed by Primetals Technologies in cooperation with PSI Metals, thus combining leading automation, metallurgical and software know-how in the steel industry.

Primetals Technologies recently received another order for a subscription license for its software for process optimization (Level 2) of continuous casting plants. This was the third order in recent months for a service offering as yet unmatched anywhere in the steel industry.

A steelmaker based in Poland is saving nearly €3 million per year after switching to NSK’s sealed-clean KVS bearings in its roll mill. Such has been the superior performance of these four-row tapered roller bearings that the company has adopted this solution for all of its tandem cold mills.

LKAB is developing technology to recycle mine waste to produce phosphorus mineral fertilisers, rare earth elements (REEs), fluorine and gypsum, in a project called ReeMAP. The first step is to use the mine waste to produce an apatite concentrate, something LKAB is now doing in their pilot plant.

Garner Aluminium Extrusions, also known as Garnalex, based in Denby, United Kingdom, has awarded SMS group the final acceptance certificate for the extrusion line it supplied. Together with OMAV S.p.A, consortium leader SMS group installed an integrated line with the HybrEx®35 as the core machine.

Slovenian tipper body specialist Farmtech constructs high-quality equipment for the demanding agricultural industry, which runs continuous transports with heavy loads. The recipe for the success of the heavy-duty dump tipper Gravis 2000 is to use Hardox® 450 wear plate throughout the model’s body.

To expand its production capacity, Jiangxi Copper Company contracted with Southwire Company, LLC, of Carrollton, Georgia, USA, for an SCR 9000 copper rod mill including shearing, rolling, and coiling equipment supplied by Primetals Technologies.

Big River Steel (BRS) is the latest in technological exploitation in CSP® technology and started production in December 2016. The approach of BRS is to focus on highly flexible production of value added steel grades. Our expert on CSP® technology Karl Hoen describes the technology of the Big River Steel plant as well the impressive operational results in the first two years of production.