Processes in the growing secondary
metallurgy sector depend on several vacuum-based treatments: vacuum degassing
(VD) for alloy steels; vacuum oxygen decarburising (VOD) for stainless steels;
and combinations of both treatments, for example vacuum degassing oxygen
blowing (VDOB) and vacuum carbon decarburising (VCD), for low and ultra-low
carbon steels.
Our vacuum systems have been successfully
applied to all these secondary metallurgy processes at customers’ production
facilities around the world. With the proven modular system design we enabled
degassing and decarburising melt sizes up to 200 tonnes in electric steelmaking
facilities (mini-mills).
In large integrated steelmaking facilities,
typically equipped with basic oxygen converters, secondary metallurgical
processing is carried out mainly in Ruhrstahl Heraeus (RH) systems.
We have developed a ‘super’ degasser module
to address the high volume flow rates needed to successfully degas and
decarburise steel products, using multiple high volumetric flow boosters in
parallel to handle the gas loads produced, while optimising the total number of
system elements required.