OREANDA-NEWS. June 10, 2010. Sintering plant. The iron and steel process of the Works starts here. Sintering of iron ore raw materials is carried out in the shop. The produced sinter is used afterwards in the production of pig iron. The task of the sinter producers is to provide the blast-furnace operators with sinter in a required quantity and of high quality. And that is 13-14 thousand tons a day though capacities of the sintering plant assume to 15-16 thousand tons of sinter a day. The sintering plant is also a sanitary assistant of metallurgical production. Metal containing waste from the metallurgical production process in the form of slime from the blast furnace, open-hearth and sintering production, and also scale from the rolling shops are delivered to the sintering shop.

How is it possible to minimize the fatal influence on environment in this case? For this purpose as far back as in the 90-ies the recycling water supply has been constructed, and almost three years ago the aspiration system with electro filters was put into operation, erasing the painful environmental problem for the city. Veterans who come to their shop only for a visit, are bewildered and they ask alarmed: doesn’t the sintering plant work anymore? Thanks to the introduction of powerful electro filters of the aspiration system in 2007, the atmosphere over the sintering plant has become cleaner. The iron-containing dust from the tail parts of the sintering machine, which used to fly in the air, is caught and returned to the sinter burden, and it is not only improvement of the ecology, but also economy. Efficiency of cleaning aspiration gases totals to 99,96 %. The process of cleaning gases is completely automated, and the set mode is maintained constantly.

The shop’s workers aim their efforts to economize raw material and fuel resources. To economize solid fuel a decision was made to increase the burden layer height on sintering machines from 400 to 450 mm. In the first quarter, thanks to transition to this technology, the shop produced ahead of schedule 56 thousand tons of sinter, without having worsened quality factors. The April plan was exceeded by 19,6 thousand tons. In May this tendency remains. The first-grade products make 99 %.

Practically all the resources have increased in price starting from the beginning of the year and the sinter operators were forced to economize the most expensive component of the burden, i.e. concentrate, the price of which since new year, has increased practically twice. By replacing it with other iron-containing materials, it is possible to hold-off the growth of the cost price of the plant’s own products.

In March and April it was possible to save up to 400 thousand UAH at the expense of increasing the sinter burden layer height by 50 mm and to 500 thousand UAH at the expense of replacing the concentrate with less expensive iron-containing raw materials.