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New Equipment Enables ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA to Produce Widths to 72 Inches
10/27/2011 - ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA has started up a hot strip annealing and pickling line and a second Sendzimir cold rolling mill at its Alabama plant.
ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA has started up a hot strip annealing and pickling line and a second Sendzimir cold rolling mill at its Alabama plant. The new equipment will enable customers in NAFTA countries to buy domestically produced stainless flat products in widths of 72 inches (183 centimeters) for the first time.
Prior to this, no stainless steel producer in the NAFTA region has manufactured 72-inch coils, and only small volumes of steel at this width had been imported. The extra-wide coils and sheet, in part cut to 36 inches, offer processing and welding advantages for customers. Examples of uses for this special size include the manufacture of large tanks for the chemical, oil and gas industries, and also for milk tanks.
“Both customers and service centers have expressed great interest in 72 inch products. We are the only manufacturer in the USA and the NAFTA region who can offer this width,” said Dr. Ulrich Albrecht-Früh, CEO of ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA, a company of the Inoxum group. He emphasized that this is an important signal for the North and Central American markets.
Dr. Albrecht-Früh explained that this addition to the product portfolio gives ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA a unique selling point in the U.S. and enables the company to move into a new market with great potential.
The new hot strip annealing and pickling line and second Sendzimir (20-roll) cold rolling mill are now being ramped up step-by-step and initial volumes have already been produced. The company began production at the Calvert site back in September 2010 with one cold rolling mill that is capable of producing widths up to 64 inches (roughly 160 centimeters). Since then the company also has started up a cold-rolled annealing and pickling line, a skin pass mill and various polishing, slitting and cut-to-length lines that will help to process the cold-rolled strip.
In addition to expanding the range of product to widths of 72 inches, the new cold rolling mill has also expanded the facility’s capacity to over 200,000 tonnes of cold-rolled strip per year.
The company noted that construction work continues on schedule for the facility’s 1 million ton per year meltshop. The first 350-ton teeming crane has already been installed, and the meltshop is scheduled to go into operation in December 2012. Until then the Calvert plant will continue to be supplied with hot band and slabs from the European mills.
ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA currently employs around 550 people. In addition to the production facilities in Alabama, the company has a sales office in Chicago that also markets products from the ThyssenKrupp Mexinox cold rolling mill in San Luis Potosí and from European supplies.
ThyssenKrupp Stainless USA is part of the Inoxum group. Inoxum brings together the worldwide production, processing and distribution of stainless steel flat products as well as the production and distribution of high-performance materials such as nickel alloys, titanium and zirconium. Companies with plants in Germany, Italy, Mexico, China and the USA employing roughly 11,300 people are organized in the Inoxum group. Sales in fiscal year 2009/10 were around 5.9 billion euros.
