Sinter Production at the Novolipetsk Metallurgical Combine: Traditions, Innovations, Growth

The Novolipetsk Metallurgical Plant was built in the 1930s and made foundry iron for machine-building plants, but during the 1960s and 1970s it became a metallurgical combine having the most modern and largest sinter plant and blast furnaces in the USSR. Equipment modernization and improvements to the technologies that are used increased the productivity of the sinter plant by 25%. The productivity of the combine's blast furnaces has increased 20% thanks to an improvement to the quality of the coke and sinter during 2013-2014, and the new blast furnace Rossiyanka, built in 2011, is setting a new record for productivity - 87-89 tons/m 2 per day. Blast-furnace smelting at the Novolipetsk Metallurgical Combine (NLMK) has its origins in the first years of the XVIII century, when the Lipetsk iron works were built by order of Peter the First. The construction of these facilities marked the birth of the town of Lipetsk. The iron works were in operation for roughly 100 years, until the local fuel resources were depleted. New stages in the development of blast-furnace smelting began in Lipetsk at the end of the XIX Century and the beginning of the XX Century, when the Svobodnyi Sokol plant was built. The Novolipetsk Metallurgical Plant's (NLMZ) first blast furnace, with a volume of 930 m 3 , began operation on November 7, 1934, and a second furnace of the same volume was introduced a year later. At the same time, the plant was also making foundry iron for machine-building plants in Russia. Further growth of the factory was halted by the Great Patriotic War, when it was dismantled and rebuilt in Chelyabinsk as the battlefront approached Lipetsk. The rebirth of the NLMZ began in the 1950s with the startup of new 1000-m 3 blast furnaces Nos. 1 and 2 (1951). In the 1960s, the NLMK began an intensive program to increase its pig- and sinter-production capacities in anticipation of the planned con- struction of converter shop No. 1. The NLMK built more powerful 2000-m 3 blast furnaces Nos. 3 (1962) and 4 (1967), and the first sinter production facility at the combine started operation in 1964. The sinter plant began operation with one sintering machine having a sintering area of 312 m 2 . Three more sintering machines of the same type were soon added. The first machine was the most powerful sintering machine in the USSR when it was introduced and it remains so to this day. Many new technologies have been developed by the machines' operators in the 50 years of existence of the sinter plant at the NLMK. Using the technical capabilities of modern sinter plants, specialists at the combine worked with scien- tists from Lipetsk State Technical University to invent and successfully introduce a technology for producing sinter with dif- ferent basicities. Use of the technology has elevated the quality of the sinter as a whole (1). Specialists in the sinter plant at the NLMK were the first in Russia to master the production of fluxed sinter made from fine-grained magnetite concentrates (2). Systematic improvement of the technology through the use of lime and refine- ment of the procedures used to moisten and ball the charge materials made it possible to increase the height of the bed on the sintering machine to 450 mm. The sinter plant also developed and successfully introduced a technology for sintering basi-