Refractories for iron and steel making: Recent trends and future prospects

All industrial furnaces involving high temperatures depend on refractories. The refractory industry has grown parallel to the iron and steel industry. At present, about 40 million tonnes per annum of refractories are produced world wide and approximately 70% are used in Iron and Steel industry. Due to process improvement, the quality of refractories has gone very high and the specific consumption of refractories has drastically reduced. In this paper, an attempt has been made to highlight the recent trends of refractories used in critical areas of Iron and Steelmaking. NML's contribution towards producing high quality refractories has also been focussed. It is hoped that specific refractory consumption in Iron and Steel industry will further reduce in the next decade due to quality improvement, innovation in application technique, hot repairing measures, monitoring the lining abrasion/erosion/corrosion by non-destructive testing etc.