Slab Caster Revamp at UGINE ALZ Genk(Belgium): Innovative Solutions in Project Management and First Operational Results

摘要

In 2000 UGINE & ALZ Belgium NV, the Belgian Stainless-Steel producer of Arcelor, decided to double its annual capacity from 600.000 tons to 1.200.000 tons. Part of the investment was an upgrade of the existing continuous casting facility. Based on economical evaluations it was decided rather to revamp the existing casting machine than to build a complete new machine. In order to minimize the production losses during the outage the time to execute the revamp had to be shortened to the utmost extent. VAI was chosen as a partner for the revamp due to its proven technology combined with its expertise in shortest revamps demonstrated on various slab casting machines An outage of only 21 days was agreed to install the world's most productive and largest stainless-steel slab caster designed for an annual output of 1.2 million tons of high-quality slabs, Fig. 1.