EVRAZ has signed a contract with DANIELI to carry out a technical modernisation of EVRAZ’s slab continuous casting machine into a billet casting machine. Once completed, the project will enable the plant to fully migrate to continuous casting. The total investments into the upgrade will exceed RUB 4.5B. Refurbishing the slab caster will enable the plant to discard casting into molds altogether, which will considerably increase production efficiency by cutting production costs of rolled goods and improving their quality. “After the slab caster upgrade we will have a radically new 12-strand billet continuous casting machine unmatched in Russia so far,” says Aleksey Ivanov, Vice President, Head of the Steel Division, EVRAZ. “The modern equipment will enable high speed of casting, over 6 metres per minute. The annual production capacity of the billet caster will be about 2.4 million tonnes of continuously cast semi-finished products. Another billet caster is now being upgraded at the plant, so in the future the two machines together will produce up to 4.6 million tonnes of square billets”. DANIELI will produce and deliver the equipment for refurbishment and then mount and fine-tune all its parts by 2018.
