8th International Congress on Science and Technology of Ironmaking - ICSTI 2018

Non-drainable trough repairs are inevitable in blast furnaces, limiting the drainage facilities. This issue became a bottleneck at G blast furnace leading to a reduction in the production levels. There are two drainable troughs at G Blast furnace with a campaign life of around 160ktons. Two types of repairs are carried out; minor repair after a life of 100ktons and major repair post the trough campaign life. The duration of trough minor repair is around 42 hours and that of trough major repair is around 85hours. As a result a total of 13 major and 13 minor repairs are carried out, thereby resulting in an annual production loss of 17,000 tons. Therefore, to reduce this production loss, various possibilities were explored to lower the frequency of trough repairs, without any compromise in trough health. The paper details out the process followed, resulting in increment in double trough operation by 13 %, which led to an increase in annual production by 17000 tons .Additionally it also helped to reduce specific trough refractory consumption by 13%.