Steel Making Process and Facilities

Raw Materials Handling

The two-berth ore pier, 1,020 feet long by 83 feet wide, and two stacking-reclaiming machines have an unloading capacity of 1,000 tons per hour. The reclaiming rate is 4,500 tons per hour.

Sinter Plant

A single-strand machine has a capacity of 4 million tons per year of sinter and includes blending and screening areas.

Blast Furnace

"L" blast furnace, which holds many of the iron production records in the United States, averages 9,000 tons per day of molten metal.

Basic Oxygen Furnaces

The steelmaking shop's two vessels each have a capacity of 290 tons and produce a heat of steel in about 40 minutes. The shop's annual capacity is 4 million tons.

Continuous Slab Caster

The facility, with a 3.6 million ton annual capacity, has two, single stand casting machines.

Hot Strip Mill

The 68-inch hot strip mill is a series of individual mill stands that reduce slabs into thin strip steel before being coiled. The mill also has off-line skin pass and slitting/trimming units.

Cold Sheet Mills

This department is one of the division's largest, with two pickling units, the 66-inch and 56-inch coil reduction mills, batch annealing units, two skin pass lines and four hot-dipped lines for the application of galvanize and Galvalume� coatings.

Tin Mills

The multi-step process involves a pickling line, cold reduction on the 48-inch tandem mill, a washing line, continuous or batch annealing, a skin mill, a double reduction mill, two halogen tin-coating lines, a chrome line, and an automated packaging line.