Quality Engineering Applications in Continuous Casting for Steel Making Technology

Abstract

The introduction of state of the art of state continuous casting facilities at the plant opened the door for several challenging tasks for improving the productivity and quality of the product. The demand for better quality in the market has risen. Defect in rolled product give rise to major problem in steel plant .This is loss to company in terms of quality and costs. The companies can improve their performance by focusing on their stragies pertaining to continuous improvement in all the aspects of business and simultaneously developing and refining the manufacturing process by minimization the defects present in different level of the organizations. There is no. of tools which is applied for reduction of defects in semi finished products .In continuous casting process, the composition of slabs produced from one heat will remain same for particular grade of steel, but during production of slabs, the factors starting from transfer of melt from ladle to tundish to cutting of strand in the form of slabs may very finalized, which can ultimately minimize defects severity in the slabs produced by continuous casting process. In this paper an attempt has been made to relate different defect with process parameters. The defects in continuous casting have by collecting five years data from an Integrated Steel plant in eastern India. Factors related to Secondary Refining Units (SRU) and caster was analyzed. Roll gap, segregation, superheat and casting speed were also analyzed. Optimization in this case can be done by design of experiments for process optimisation for continuous casting. The line balancing methodology is important for avoiding superheating which leads to defect in casting and off-grade of steel.