Improved plant availability and less maintenance

China Steel Corporation (CSC), Taiwan, has awarded SMS group the contract to supply three 160-ton converters for its No. 1 steel making plant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The aim of the upgrade is to improve the availability of the converters and reduce the need for maintenance.

Replacement of the old and commissioning of the three new converters are scheduled for the period 2020 to 2022.

Hung-Ta Lin, Ass. General Superintendent, Steel Making Dept. CSC Taiwan: “We have been operating a BOF converter shop from SMS group at Dragon Steel Corporation for some years now. Our experience with SMS group has been so good that the choice for this order was an easy one. We look forward to working with SMS group in the years to come.”

The scope of supply covers the converter vessels, the trunnion rings, the proven lamella-type vessel suspension system, the tilt drives, the X-Pact^® electrical and automation systems for the tilt drives, and supervision of erection and commissioning.

SMS group will ship the trunnion rings of 9-meter-diameter each in one piece to the customer’s site in Taiwan, considerably reducing the overall installation time.

The maintenance-free lamella-type converter suspension system ensures unrestrained arrangement of the converter vessel in the trunnion ring.

Thanks to the use of the lamella suspension system, a larger air gap between the vessel and the trunnion ring and high-quality, and high-strength fine-grained structural steels, the converters can cope ideally with the alternating thermal stress during operation.

The X-Pact^® electrical and automation systems for the converter tilt drives feature frequency-controlled three-phase drive technology which guarantees not only a high level of plant availability but also safe and reliable positioning of the converter vessels under continually changing dynamic loads.