9th ECCC European Continuous Casting Conference – ECCC 2017

In 2014 Fuxin Special Steel Co. Ltd., Taiwan, has successfully commissioned a steelworks for manufacturing stainless steel slabs at the Zhangzhou location in the Chinese Fujian Province. The new construction project comprises a special steel plant, a vertical liquid bending continuous slab caster, environmental facilities for gas cleaning and energy recovery and the complete X-Pact® electric and automation. The works is designed for a production of 1 million tons of steel per year. The range of grades produced by the steel plant comprises ferritic, austenitic and martensitic stainless steels, which are processed on the continuous caster to provide slabs in thicknesses of 200 or 220 millimeters. During casting, the width can be set steplessly from 800 to 1,600 millimeters. The continuous caster is equipped with Intelligent Slab Casting modules (ISC®). These include the hydraulically driven resonance oscillator, the HD moldTC (thermocouple) with Breakout Prediction System and Mold Temperature Mapping and the position-controlled CYBERLINK segments. The electromagnetic strand stirrer (EMS) is used for manufacturing very high-quality slabs. EMS enables the formation of fine-grained, globular and homogeneous microstructures and increases the process flexibility and the flow rate. The technologies ensure the internal quality and surface quality of stainless steel slabs. To cool the stainless steel slabs a special logistics for the slab yard was developed. In the presentation we discuss some details of the caster and results regarding production and quality of slabs.