Ceramics & Refractories/Insulation

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The year-over-year U.S. inflation rate through February 2022 hit a 40-year high of 7.9%, eroding purchasing power especially for gas, food and rent.

HarbisonWalker International (HWI) announced that its Alabama One (AL1) manufacturing facility for steel customers in the southern United States is on schedule to open before the end of 2022. HWI is investing approximately $25 million to convert its closed property in Fairfield, Ala., into AL1, a manufacturing, service and distribution hub. Production will initially add approximately 15,000 metric tons annually and ultimately up to 30,000 metric tons as additional equipment is added by 2023. The 200,000-square-foot facility will produce refractories expressly designed for use in low-emission electric-arc furnaces (EAFs). It will produce magnesia-carbon brick for servicing steel ladles, using core raw materials that can be sized accordingly for a full range of steelmaking refractory needs.

In the middle of the last century, a scientist employed by the Carborundum Company fulfilled the industrialized market requirements for a low-thermal-mass insulation material.

Here is a complete list of all the feature articles – by topic – that appeared in Industrial Heating in 2021. The month each article appeared in is included. All articles are hyperlinked for your convenience.

In refractory lining maintenance, recommendations for repairs and relines often consist of selecting a similar or equivalent material to replace the original. Sometimes that’s sufficient.

If you’re at all like me, you wonder which articles get the most attention on our website. Every year we publish over 40 feature articles, and at the end of the year we gather statistics to see which ones get the most page views. So, without further ado, here are the five most-viewed articles on www.industrialheating.com based on page views in 2021. This ranking applies only to articles published in 2021.

HarbisonWalker International (HWI) intends to invest $25 million to convert its closed Fairfield, Ala., plant into an advanced refractories manufacturing, service and distribution hub for southern U.S. steelmakers. Construction will begin during the first quarter of 2022, and the 200,000-square-foot facility is expected to open before the end of the year. The investment will increase refractory capacity and efficiency commensurate with steel customers’ production investments. HWI anticipates hiring 50 highly trained technicians and staff in a team-based environment at the plant.

Plicast Al-Rezist is a line of low-cement, aluminum-resistant refractories expressly engineered to mitigate damaging and costly corundum growth in furnaces. 

The Brokk Cart improves efficiency when moving remote-controlled demolition robots across hard, level surfaces, such as those in a maintenance shop.

Registration for IHEA’s Fundamentals of Industrial Process Heating Online Learning Course is now open. Scheduled to begin January 17, 2022, the six-week class will run through February 27. The flexible online format and interactive forums are just some of the benefits of this class. The curriculum includes the basics of heat transfer, fuels and combustion, energy use, furnace design, refractories, automatic control, and atmospheres as applied to industrial process heating. Weekly coursework, quizzes and a final-exam project are administered to guide students on their progress and evaluate their knowledge of the material.