OREANDA-NEWS. EVRAZ and DANIELI signed a contract on technical modernisation of the slab continuous casting machine into a billet casting machine. Once completed, the project will enable the plant to fully migrate to continuous casting. The total investments into the upgrade will exceed RUB 4.5 billion.

Refurbishing the slab caster will enable the plant to discard casting into molds altogether, which will significantly increase production efficiency by cutting production costs of rolled goods and improving their quality. The upgraded casting machine will use the open method, also contributing to lower costs.

“After the slab caster upgrade we will have a radically new 12-strand billet continuous casting machine unmatched in Russia so far,” says Aleksey Ivanov, Vice President, Head of the Steel Division, EVRAZ. “The modern equipment will enable high speed of casting, over 6 metres per minute. The annual production capacity of the billet caster will be about 2.4 million tonnes of continuously cast semi-finished products. Another billet caster is now being upgraded at the plant, so in the future the two machines together will produce up to 4.6 million tonnes of square billets”.

By the end of 2016, the complete specifications for the project will be developed. In 2017-2018, DANIELI will produce and deliver the equipment for refurbishment and then mount and fine-tune all its parts. The upgrade project is estimated for completion in 2018.