February 2025 Volume 7

MATERIALS

Balancing Tradition and Technology

By adopting a vertical design (non-bending type machine), the caster achieves superior inclusion distribution and soundness in the steel it produces. For forgers, this means dependable materials for their toughest jobs. The next step in this evolution is the bloom furnace, which elevates the caster’s capabilities by addressing a critical bottle neck in the production process: reheating blooms for rolling. For years, soaking pits have been a key part of reheating the largest steel blooms and ingots, handling the job with dependable efficiency. But as industry demands grow, so does the need for new solutions. Because soaking pits heat blooms and ingots gradu ally to ensure even temperature uniformity, the process tends to take longer. Instead, by continuously reheating 18" x 24" blooms for optimal rolling, the new furnace will reduce yield loss, enhance bloom surface quality and streamline material handling. With expected capaci ties of 180 tons per hour (tph) for cold charge and 220 tph for hot charge, it will offer the ability to process longer blooms and a variety of steel grades to give forgers new opportunities to innovate and expand their horizons.

furnaces are leading the charge in sustain ability as well. They’re built to use less energy, lower emissions and still deliver excellent results. Bridging Casting and Reheating At the Faircrest plant, the bloom furnace is situated near the jumbo bloom vertical caster, creating a direct path from casting to reheating. It’s positioned perfectly between the caster and rolling mill. Here, the integration of cutting-edge digital and automated systems stands out as one of the furnace’s most ground breaking aspects, putting it ahead of conventional reheating systems. SMS Group, known worldwide for its metallur gical expertise, collaborated with Metallus to turn this vision into reality. At the heart of the furnace’s innovation is SMS’ proprietary X-Pact® Prometheus software, an analytics platform designed to optimize reheating processes with extreme precision. The software takes real-time data and crafts an ideal heating plan for each bloom. It keeps the temperature even and avoids unnecessary exposure to heat, preserving the steel’s quality by mini mizing oxidation and decarburization.

By letting steel solidify in a large vertical mold cross-section, steel solidification can have the hybrid efficiency of continuous casting and solidification soundness like bottom-poured ingots. Soaking pits (initially designed for reheating ingots) have been used for jumbo bloom reheating at Metallus since 2014 because of the shear size of the largest blooms cast. While reliable, they can’t match the efficiency or precision of furnaces purpose-built for modern bloom reheating. Even so, they remain an essen tial part of steelmaking and have paved the way for solutions like continuous reheat furnaces that enhance efficiency. Metallus’ approach is a walking beam furnace, which has a combination of fixed and moving beams that guide blooms through different heating zones. This design guarantees uniform heating, mini mizes waste and enhances the surface finish of the steel while also providing flex ibility in processing to handle both cold and hot charge blooms. With features like digital controls and energy-efficient burners, modern reheat

Straight-Up Innovation Vertical continuous casting ensures precise, consistent results by casting and solidifying blooms in a vertical position. The jumbo bloom vertical caster’s large cross-section has solidification more akin to the bottom-poured ingot-making process. The molten steel flows into the tundish, where inclusions float to the surface and are absorbed by the tundish flux. The cooling is uniform, and there’s no mechanical stress on the bloom’s shell causing defects during the casting process.

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