Capital repair of Blast Furnace - A low cost method to re-establish the existing facility with higher campaign life

摘要

India is the world's second largest steel producer after China and the ambitious vision of the Government of India targets 300 MTPA steel production by the year 2030. The present production capacity of India is hovering around 126 Million Tonnes. Hence, there is a mammoth target of increment in steel production of around 174 Million Tonnes in the coming 13 years. With this in mind, it is needless to mention that along with the new Greenfield projects, revamping, up-gradation and increase in efficiency of existing units are also of paramount importance to achieve the targeted production. For efficient utilisation of existing facilities, capital repair is an important tool worthy to mention. Capital repair of Blast furnace provides the plant an opportunity to improve the design, based on practical operating experiences and technologies in vogue, within the existing facilities without any CAPEX allocation and at bare minimum expenditure. It also gives an option for reviewing the existing refractory lining configuration and changes, if any, based on modern designs for enabling enhancement in working volume and efficiency. Since, shutdown of a Blast Furnace affects enormously the productivity of the Plant, the capital repair job calls for a stringent time schedule along with continuous monitoring of quality and precautionary safety measures. In this article, various aspects of a Blast Furnace capital repair job, emphasizing mainly on the refractory lining, has been discussed for execution of the job more effectively in techno-economical point of view.