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JSW Steel Lights Rebuilt Blast Furnace

According to Paul Wurth, the rebuilt No. 1 blast furnace at JSW Steel’s Vijayanagar Works was blown in on 8 February.

The company provided the design and engineering and supplied the equipment for the furnace and all of its main ancillary plants. It also was responsible for overseeing installation and commissioning the major plant units.

Paul Wurth said the rebuilt furnace was outfitted with an all-staves, thin-wall cooling system and a Bell Less Top parallel top with a MIDI gearbox. The casthouse and auxiliary plants also were upgraded.

More specifically, improvements were made to the top gas cleaning and slag granulation systems and to the water treatment and pulverized coal injection plants. A new hot stove plant with a waste-gas heat recovery system also was installed.

The furnace now has an inner volume of volume of 2,307 cubic meters, a hearth diameter of 10.4 meters and 28 hot blast tuyeres. Prior to the project, the furnace had an inner volume of 1,250 cubic meters, a diameter of 8 meters and 18 tuyeres.

The rebuilt furnace sits on the old foundations, which were reinforced, and fits into the existing square tower. The old furnace had run from 2004 until August 2015.

All told, the furnace is now capable of making 1.7 million tons of iron annually, an 89 percent increase. According to Paul Wurth, the project yielded one of the largest-ever capacity increases from a single blast furnace rebuild.