Rourkela Steel Plant (RSP) is all set to enter a new era of productivity, profitability and quality as the Board of Steel Authority of India Limited (Sail) has formally given approval in principle to a proposal for its modernisation and capacity expansion at an indicative cost of Rs 9,869 crore.
The objectives of expansion include increase in production of crude steel through state-of-the-art technology in order to meet the productivity level of international standards, improvement in quality of products, reduction in energy consumption, cut in cost of production and thereby increase in net sales realisation.
As per the approval, the hot metal production capacity of the steel plant will soar to 4.5 million tons per annum (MTPA). The massive modernisation programme of RSP includes setting up of a fifth blast furnace with working volume of 4,060 cubic meters and productivity of 2.3 tons per meter cube per day. This apart, blast furnace-1 will be reconstructed and upgraded to 1,250 meter cube useful volume with high top pressure and coal dust injection facilities, while in blast furnace-4, coal dust injection system will be incorporated, thereby more than doubling the present hot metal capacity of the plant.
In order to augment the steel producing capacity, RSP is going to install a new 150 ton converter and a new caster in its SMS-II. New RH-OB unit will be introduced in SMS-II to produce clean steel such as ultra low carbon steels. Two new matching ladle heating furnaces (LHF) are also on the cards, which will take the number of LHFs to three. One of the existing casters will also be upgraded. These augmentation measures will take the total crude steel capacity of RSP to the level of 4.2 MTPA.
In view of the increasing demand for high end products, the RSP will be going in for a new plate mill with a capacity of 1.8 MTPA that will roll out different grades of plates up to the width of 4,200 MM meeting the stringent specific customer requirements. In order to further improve the quality of hot rolled strips, the finishing mill train of HSM will be modernised to meet the customers’ requirement and to improve the operation and quality of downstream units.
An entirely new mill to produce 1,80,000 tons of CRNO steel will be coming up under this modernisation package, taking the total capacity of this superior grade steel to 2.55 lakh tons per annum.
source-www.statesman.net