China's Refractories

Abstract: Clean steel encompasses a multitude of concepts that are based on fulfilling customer requirements and can be produced in many ways depending on the existing equipment and detailed customer demands. A common feature of all clean steel production is tight process control along with continuous monitoring. To meet an increasing demand for cold-rolled (CR) steel sheets of improved mechanical properties, and to cope with the change of the annealing process from a batch-type to a continuous process, it is necessary to establish a technique for making ultralow carbon (ULC) steel with a C-concentration lower than 20 ppm for the steelmaking process associated with a major challenge to guarantee the competitiveness with observance of environmental requirements. Steel ladle lining plays an important role on the energy consumption during the production and the refractory lining design contributes to minimize thermal bath loss, carbon pick up and shell temperature. A new generation of unfired zero carbon refractories was developed with two specific approaches: (1) replacement of firing bricks reducing CO₂ footprint and (2) replacement of carbon containing with performance increasing. Bricks can be used in working and safety linings with a unique microstructure with better heat scattering and similar thermomechanical properties. This work presents customers’performance compared to traditional products highlighting energy savings.

Key words: steel ladle, zero carbon, energy saving