Named ‘Kalyani’, the state-of-the-art furnace has a useful volume of 4160 cubic meters and has now become the biggest operating blast furnace in the country. Prior to this, the largest blast furnace in the country was installed by SAIL at its Rourkela Steel Plant in 2013 — it has a useful volume of 4060 cubic meters.
 
The furnace is equipped with the most advanced features such as high top pressure operation coupled with top pressure recovery turbine, twin material bin bell-less top, stove waste heat recovery, pulverized coal injection, cast house fume extraction, just to name a few. It incorporates Level II automation and has twin flat cast house with four tap holes. The environment-friendly furnace will not only ensure minimum emissions and recovery of waste energy to the fullest, but also has a closed-loop cooling system resulting in almost zero water discharge.
 
“With this, IISCO Steel Plant is firmly on course to regain its glorious past,” said Shri C. S. Verma, SAIL chairman, immediately after the blowing-in. The start-up of this furnace is seen as the culmination of a massive modernization and expansion work in Burnpur for the installation of a state-of-the-art 2.5-million-tons-per-annum steel plant. The other major upstream and downstream units of the new steel plant — a coke oven battery, sinter plant, basic oxygen furnaces, continuous casters, and a wire rod mill — have already commenced operations.