Steel Institute of VDEh (Düsseldorf, Germany)

H. B. Lüngen, Dr. Eng., Director of Technology, e-mail: hansbodo.luengen@vdeh.de

thyssenkrupp Steel Europe AG (Duisburg, Germany)
P. Schmöle, Dr., Prof.

Steel is the material No 1 in the world with wide ranging properties and recycling possibilities as well as manifold applications for our society. Blast furnaces are the world's No 1 pre-product supplier for crude steel production. About 1.87 billion t of ferrous input materials were required to produce 1.69 billion t of crude steel in 2017. 1. 1.17 billion t of this input material, or 62.6 %, was hot metal produced in blast furnaces. Blast furnaces have proven a wide range of constructional and operational flexibility. Production capacities of 0.3 to 5/5 million t hot metal per year per single module are in industrial application. The operations are varying in a wide flexible range depending on regional and other circumstances in manifold possibilities regarding ferrous burden structure, reductant rates like use and amount of coke replacing auxiliary reducing agents and coke rates, productivity levels and oxygen injection rates and the durability in the blast furnace campaigns. One aspect are the requirements on the quality of ferrous burden materials and blast furnace coke.

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