Tenaris plans to restart activity at its two plants in Pennsylvania: the Koppel melt shop and Ambridge seamless pipe mill. The plant in Koppel – the company’s first domestic steel shop – is finalizing an investment announced in 2020 to upgrade its steel bar size capabilities while also incorporating additional improvements in safety and automation. Tenaris has since increased its investment to include the revamping of existing cranes used to feed the furnace with scrap metal and a new production management system to improve process control at the steel shop. The more than $15 million investment is projected to be completed in May with production to start up in June.
Ovako Steel’s 2018 investment in a vacuum tank degassing (VTD) facility is a critical development for the Smedjebacken mill. Removal of hydrogen by a state-of-the-art vacuum process now enables Ovako to address the needs of forgers that require high-performance, reliable and cost-effective steel for demanding applications such as those in the automotive industry.
Nucor Corp. will build a new tube mill on the site of its Nucor Steel Gallatin sheet mill in Kentucky. This location will allow the company to take advantage of investments made to expand capacity of the Gallatin mill and add a galvanizing line. The $164 million project is expected to be in operation by the middle of 2023 and create more than 70 new full-time jobs. The tube mill will have the capacity to produce approximately 250,000 tons annually of hollow structural section (HSS) steel tubing, mechanical steel tubing and galvanized solar torque tube. The Gallatin County site puts the facility near expanding solar markets in the United States and the largest consuming regions for HSS steel tubing.
Boston Metal raised $50 million in Series B funding, positioning the company to accelerate industrial-scale deployments of its molten oxide electrolysis (MOE) technology toward emissions-free steel. The company’s MOE technology uses electricity to transform metals from a raw oxide form into high-purity molten metal products, facilitating CO2 emissions-free steel production from a wide array of iron ores in a potentially more efficient, less costly and more sustainable approach.
Nucor Steel has an extensive special bar quality (SBQ) steel program that dates back to the conversion of its plants in South Carolina, Tennessee and Nebraska to handle the product decades ago. In 2002, the company purchased an idled plant in Tennessee that was dedicated to SBQ production.
Pulse plasma offers significantly more precision in nitriding through the control of the mixture of gases, the controllability of glow-discharge intervals, the design of the pulsed signal and the use of a highly insulated hot-wall nitride furnace. Together with innovations in the design of the furnaces to streamline batch management in nitriding operations, forgers can benefit from dies with superior surface hardness, wear resistance, heat resistance and fatigue strength.
Additive manufacturing (AM) has rapidly evolved since its inception, and investment in AM technology has flourished in both the public and private sectors. This article, the first of two parts, evaluates predictions made in FORGE in 2012 and illustrates some appropriate applications that could affect (or already have affected) forging processes and markets.
Dragon Steel Corp. Ltd., a subsidiary of China Steel Corp. located in Taichung, Taiwan, granted SMS Concast, a company of SMS group, the final acceptance certificate (FAC) for the modernization of its six-strand billet caster. The objective of the revamp was to improve the billet quality for applications including fasteners, welding rod, mechanical components and others. The project, which consisted of an automation upgrade and the introduction of dynamic secondary air-mist cooling (COOL-DSC) as the main modernization measures, has achieved a distinct improvement in product quality in terms of internal structure and surface cracking.
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