Russia’s NLMK Steel resumed upgrading activities at continuous reheating furnace No.3, which is used for bringing slabs to forging temperature before hot rolling. The capacity of the furnace is 320 metric tons of slabs per hour. The design of the new furnace being constructed to replace the old one will ensure highly uniform slab heating and very accurate strip parameters on further rolling. Cutting-edge resource efficiency and ecologically friendly technologies will allow NLMK to cut energy consumption by 50% and reduce NOx and CO emissions by 27%.

The project is being implemented as part of the second stage of NLMK’s Technical Upgrade Program at its main production site in Lipetsk. The new furnace will be commissioned in 2011, increasing NLMK’s hot-rolling capacity by 200,000 metric tons/year of a wide variety of steel grades.