Baosteel Stainless Steel Business Unit’s cold rolled stainless steel production line recently achieved full capacity and exceeded the line’s design capacity. The company said the line had also achieved records on a number of key technical and economic indicators such as the unit's effective operation rate, the first-class product rate and process costs.
The company’s Stainless Steel Business Unit’s cold rolled stainless steel production line includes a stainless steel heat-back pickling line, stainless steel cold-back pickling unit, 20-high mill and five-stand tandem mill, and the corresponding units, making it an extremely important production line in Baosteel stainless steel system.
The unit’s five-stand continuous rolling mill, which was the most difficult in cold-rolled stainless steel production line, successfully achieved the production of 400 series stainless steel in late April of 2010, under the guidance of Baosteel’s “golden apple” experts. This achievement made Baosteel the first domestic steel enterprise to possess intellectual property rights for 400-serie stainless steel rolling technology.
With the addition of the 5-stand tandem mill's stainless steel production capacity and with "quick profit" as the guiding ideology, the Stainless Steel Business Unit quickly upgraded its volume and profitability of cold rolled stainless steel production and in November, it organized a cold rolled stainless steel whole process production enhancement research activity. The Business Unit set up a joint research team comprising representatives from the cold rolling plant, manufacturing department, equipment department, marketing department, Ningbo Steel, No 1 Steel to orchestrate the whole process production program, allocating specific indicators to each unit and each team. Ningbo Steel conducted three comprehensive checks on the cold rolling plant and made a number of improvement recommendations.
The research team optimized the planning of hot-back and cold-back pickling units, minimized steel switching frequency and explored unit capacity while ensuring 400-series stainless steel quality. The team adjusted the cold-back pickling line’s 400-serie production annealing technique and effectively improved the line’s production capacity. The team also focused on promoting the full reliability of each unit so that unplanned downtime was significantly reduced. In November, the whole cold rolled stainless steel production line's effective operation rate reached the best level and laid a solid foundation for the unit's heavy volume production.
The Business Unit also did research on the top three quality defects in cold-rolled stainless steel products. As a result, the unit achieved substantial reduction in the occurrence of surface roughness, white spot, and "herring bone", even reaching the lowest level to date of such defects.
As the cold rolled stainless steel production line continued to increase its scale of production and improve its product quality, process cost have been significantly reduced, with the whole process cost gap compared to Ningbo Steel’s new model unit falling from 3,088 yuan per ton in March to 463 yuan in November, favorably exceeding the Business Unit’s goal set to achieve a level of less than 700 yuan before the end of the year.
