AG der Dillinger Hütte & Saarstahl (Dillingen, Germany):

Blessing K., Dr., CEO, e-mail: info@dillinger.biz

Innovation, safety and environmental friendliness – these aspects permeate the technological focus of the steel industry in Germany and Europe as well as that of Saarstahl and Dillinger Hütte. Development efforts in both companies are correspondingly diversified and include material development; metallurgy; process development and optimization; and the development of new products and applications. The company is a technological leader in casting exceptionally thick and heavy slabs, among other things, and has persistently developed its continuous casting technology since the construction of its first continuous slab caster more than 50 years ago. Further development of the rolling and cooling technologies and process control is also being pushed to allow consistent manufacturing of new, improved and more efficient products. The focus is on producing extremely fine structures as a basis for exacting combinations of strength and resistance to brittle fracture. Sophisticated thermomechanical rolling techniques are used in combination with accelerated cooling of the plate immediately after rolling on a high-tech cooling line developed especially for this purpose. Examples here include the successful efforts of Saarstahl researchers, working together with the steel plant’s engineers, to develop continuous billet casting to the point that a wide range of billets can now be produced to especially exacting specifi cations through direct continuous casting rather than the significantly more laborious method requiring repeated rolling of an output crosssection. In another important step in this area, use of the soft-reduction method has been established for the dimensions of 150 mm x 150 mm. Compared to conventional continuous billet casting, steel produced with this method displays a range of significantly improved quality characteristics, which in turn reveals a large potential for improving and optimizing many existing and new grades of steel. Insight gained during the development of the soft-reduction method was incorporated into the design and construction of the new S3 continuous casting line.