OREANDA-NEWS. Tata Steel subsidiary, Cogent Power, has unveiled a range of sophisticated new electrical steel products which reduce electricity losses by 20-30 percent compared to conventional grain-oriented grades.

The new products are being made at Cogent Power's Orb works in Newport, South Wales. The Orb works produce cold rolled, grain-oriented electrical steel for the manufacture of modern electricity transformers that are used to build and renew the world's major power networks.

As global demand for electricity continues to grow, so does the requirement from the power industry for products that enable electricity to be generated and transmitted more reliably and efficiently.

Stuart Wilkie, managing director of Cogent Power, said: “These new, high-grade products will make a significant contribution to the preservation of natural resources, by reducing energy lost in the generation and transmission of electricity. They benefit our customers and the whole of society.”

The launch of the new grades follows the integration in 2011 of Tata Steel's electrical steels production route. The Orb plant now receives hot rolled coil, made in a patented process at the company's steelworks at IJmuiden in the Netherlands.

The new grades - M080-23DR, M085-23DR, M090-27DR and M095-27DR - support this requirement, by enabling the production of highly efficient steel cores housed within the transformers used in energy transmission networks.

In addition, Cogent Power has invested in a new, one-metre wide, transformer core cutting line at its Canadian manufacturing facility in Burlington, Ontario, to meet the needs of large power transformer manufacturers in North America.

Cogent Power Inc slits and cuts-to-length grain-oriented electrical steel coils made at the Orb plant. Its new cutting line enables it to increase the sizes of the core laminations it can supply to the market and meet customers' increasing demand for large transformer cores.