Waking up a giant
Blast furnaces are the giants of steelmaking, the place where the production of steel begins. A blast furnace never stops… until it does stop. With the global economic crisis, dozens of blast furnaces Group-wide were idled. Now, many of them are restarting again. Waking up the steelmaking giants is a complex and rewarding adventure…
Restarting a blast furnace is a complex operation because blast furnaces are huge and the level of inertia in the way they operate is very important. For our colleague Ignacio González, Head of Blast Furnaces in Asturias, Spain, restarting a blast furnace is like taking off a jumbo jet.
“The most critical moments are at the beginning: if the jumbo has an incident while flying at cruise speed and height, it’s not as serious as if it happens in the runway. Any problem when the jumbo is 50 metres above the runway can be catastrophic. The same thing happens with a blast furnace: when the first liquids are produced, it can get complicated,” Ignacio explains.
His team has participated in most of the blast furnace restarts in our Group in the past 2 years. One moment to remember? “The team went to support a restart in a remote place. It was a very complicated restart of a chilled blast furnace. There was a lot of expectation from the local team. When the first iron came out from the metal notch, everyone started to applaud spontaneously. It was a moment full of emotion,” Ignacio tells us. Not everyday does one wake up a giant!
6 comments
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October 7th, 2009 by Ivan Schalck
Dear Ignacio,
I have full respect and admiration for the work you and your team are performing. The fine tuned know how for fast BF restart is a key asset for ArcelorMittal. It brings finally the desired flexibility for swithching on/off blast furnaces. This is a revolutionary approach than the former philosophy during last decades that a blast furnace should never shut down, but for revamping.
Congratulations with your work.
Ivan Schalck
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October 9th, 2009 by coen van gorp
The last few months we are faced with several shut downs of BF. We explain this to our customers in a very simplistic way. Now some of the BF are restarted again. Again we inform our customers about this in a symplistic way. For me this is to easy and I would like to have a summery to my disposal explaining/showing the events/risks and timeline concerning the stop and restart of a BF
This way I would like to involve our customers much closer and let them understand our world a little better. Through the eyes of many customers we are seen as inflexible and conservative. By informing them they will understand our business a little better.Do you think this is possible such a 1 page story.
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October 9th, 2009 by Laura
Bump!
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October 9th, 2009 by Bill Zelnis,RN
Coen,I would love to see the process, step by step, with photos, if possible. Bringing a Coke Oven Battery off of hot idle is complicated, but this has to be much more. Please try and list the step process from going cold to restart. THANKS
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October 14th, 2009 by raquel
Thanks for all your comments! The restart of our steelmaking facilities is really an exciting process. To learn more about it, please take a look at the October edition of ‘1′ (Coen, you are really synchronised with the Internal Communications team ; ) as well as to the special report on blast furnace restarts in the upcoming edition of ‘boldspirit’
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November 30th, 2009 by David Johnson
As an engineer, I’ve been involved in several blast furnace rebuilds and relines in my career and agree that the process is very complicated. The making of iron in a blast furnace has been described to me as ‘the most complex chemical reaction in manufacturing today’. I can’t confirm this, but the statement certainly should make people aware of just how complicated the process is. Planning, teamwork and communication are the keys to starting-up one of these sleeping giants.
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