In the last ten years, Europe has been a very active player in the development of new continuous casting techniques for thin slabs or strip. In the thin slab area, SMS, followed by MDH, Danieli and VOEST-Alpine, has shown that high speed casting of thin slabs makes it possible to produce flat products economically at the mini-mill scale. Two plants, stemming from this family of technologies are in the starting up or the building stage, in the USA (NUCOR) and in Italy (ARVEDI). If casting between belts on a Hazelett machine, as tried by Krupp, has proved unsuccessful, British Steel with its Horizontal Caster and the Thyssen/ USINOR-SACILOR/SMS consortium with the CPR technology are exploring new fields. In the strip casting area, the programs are numerous and cover most of the possible technologies from single-roll to twin roll and belt & roll processes. If they are still in the stage of the basic demonstration of feasability, some of them have exhibited clearly positive results and entered the semi-industrial pilot stage, in Germany (Krupp-VDM), in France (IRSID), in Italy (CSM-ILVA), or in Austria (VOEST-Allegheny/Ludlum). Within the European Community, the ECSC Technical Research on Steel has been an important factor in the technical modernization of the European Steel Industry and has had an important catalytic effect, especially in the field of strip casting, as will be pointed out in the text.
展开▼
