The New TATA Steel 'H' Blast Furnace: Design Concept, Project Development and Operating Results

摘要

In May 2008, the new H blast furnace of Tata Steel was successfully blown in. Blast furnace 'H' has been designed, supplied, erected and commissioned by a consortium consisting of Paul Wurth Italia, Paul Wurth India, and Larsen & Toubro India. Excellent cooperation between all participants and active involvement of Tata Steel people resulted in project completion in 25 months from the groundbreaking, which is the shortest possible time ever taken for building a blast furnace of similar size in India.The foundation stone for this 2.5 MTPA Blast Furnace was laid in June, 2006. The project broadly involved a total of 80,000 m3 of civil work, 28,000 tons of structural work, 20,000 tons of equipment erection, 22,000 tons of refractory work, 1.5 km of rail track and 1500 km of electrical cabling job. All the shells and major pipe line were fabricated in-house by Growth Shop of Tata Steel and most of the equipment has been procured from reputed OEMs Overseas. The whole plant has been designed and erected within an area of 63 acre due to space constraints.In a construction period of 25 months the whole blast furnace was therefore built in a brown-field area located inside the works of Jamshedpur (India). Despite several layout constraints already hinted, it was possible to accommodate in this limited space a furnace having a working volume of 3230 m~3. All operational and logistic constraints were indeed taken into account at the time of planning, design and engineering and the major challengesof accommodating all necessary auxiliary and support facilities within boundary limits wasachieved through a meticulous layout planning keeping in mind that a massive volume ofmaterials had to be handled within the limited space.The project applied state of the art solutions to all BF plant units envisaging, in severalcases, technologies never applied before in India: 2nd generation PW BLT? chargingsystem, PW pulverized coal injection, PW internal combustion chamber stoves with Heatpipes Heat Recovery system, Top Gas Recovery Turbine and electrically driven air blowersystem.Top priority was always given to safety and quality along the construction erection andoperation so to guarantee safe working conditions .There was no accident and no loss timeinjury during the construction period. A three dimensional scaled model of the whole H BFplant was also developed by PW to optimize the use of space so avoiding any interferenceand properly locate the installations but also for checking easy maintenance and safetyidentifying possible accessibility and erections problems.The BF was blown in on 31st May 2008 in a smooth and safe way.The stabilisation of BF process after blow in was the fastest ever achieved in TATA Steel.In fact, the very first cast was taken out within 30 hours; the blow in burden was designedso that the first metal with 1.38% silicon was sent to BOF shop for conversion into steel.Immediately afterward, one of the two blowers failed causing a restriction on air volume. Insubsequent months, H Blast furnace repeatedly achieved a daily specific productivity percubic meter of working volume equal to 3.1. This value had never got before by any BFplant in India. The maximum daily production achieved by this plant has been 10350 HMt.The maximum monthly production in the first 18 months of operation has been 285000HMt. The HM throughput during first year of operation has been 2.48 Million Hot Metaltons, practically equal to the design rated yearly production.This testifies how effectively the loss of production connected to the ramp up period hasbeen balanced by the subsequent operation at values significantly higher than the designones.So far, these values represent record values for Blast Furnaces operating in India.