Slide Gate Plate (called SGP hereafter) is one of the critical refractory components in slide gate system devised for casting and metering liquid metals. Normally the performance of SGP determines and limits the service life of slide gate refractory components. Moreover the life of plate for any slide gate system strongly depends on the selection of refractory quality based on casting conditions and steel grades produced at a specific steel plant. Generally different qualities of plates are required for casting different critical steel grades and it requires good amount of knowledge and expertise for this selection. However a steel plant can not use different qualities of plates simultaneously to cast different critical steel grades and practically it is very difficult to control such situation and may lead to disaster any time. So a versatile plate which is capable to handle safely most of the critical steel grades is very much required to solve such kind of problem. Therefore in this paper an attempt has been made to develop a versatile slide gate plate suitable for casting most of the critical steel grades including calcium-alloy-treated steel. The versatile plate is designed and developed by optimizing different refractory properties required for this product. It is basically a special carbon-bonded Alumina-Zirconia-Carbon material having some specific properties derived from selective raw materials and special additives. In this paper field results of versatile plate have been discussed at length even in casting Ca-alloy treated steel for achieving optimum life with operational safety. It has been observed that versatile plate is successfully running in most of the critical steel grades including a steel grade having up to 50 ppm calcium level in some steel plants. Therefore a detailed study has been done in this paper to understand the performance of versatile plate in different steel grades at different steel plants.
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