Nisco, established in 1958, owns a total production capacity of 10 million metric t of steel per year, including the production capacity of its key product plate-in-coil, covering more than 3 million metric t/a, with integration of iron ore mining and dressing, iron making, steel making, steel rolling and steel further processing. The company operates a total of four continuous casting machines supplied by Primetals.
Bloom caster No. 8 is located in Nisco´s steel plant No. 3, an electric steelmaking facility with a production capacity of 1.5 million metric t/a. The caster itself may produce 0.6 million metric t/a with three strands. It features a machine radius of 12 m and a metallurgical length of 37.1 m, and up to now casts blooms with a rectangular cross section of 320 x 480 mm. Maximum casting speed is 0.6 m/min. The caster processes steel grades from low to high carbon steels as well as special alloyed steels.
For the original machine started up in 2008, Primetals had procured the basic engineering of the entire casting equipment as well as the detail engineering of key components. Supplies included curved plate type molds with LevCon mold level control and external mold stirrer, DynaFlex hydraulic oscillators with on-line stroke, frequency and wave pattern adjustment, the strand guides consisting of: exchangeable segments 1–3, seven withdrawal stands with DynaGap Soft Reduction for bloom casters, chain type dummy bars with bottom feeding system, the DynaSpeed secondary cooling model, and the runout area equipped with torch cutting, marking, deburring and walking beam collecting table. The level 1 and level 2 automation systems were also part of the project as was the VAI-Q Bloom quality control system.
_{(Source: Primetals Technologies, Limited)}