Heavy Fabrication for Extreme Metallurgical Environments
Metallurgical facilities and steel mills demand machinery that can survive in brutal environments. Equipment is routinely subjected to liquid metal thermal shock, corrosive slags, continuous cyclic loading, and severe impacts. Fabricating these structures requires a partner with extreme heavy-lifting capacities, ultra-thick plate forming experience, and highly advanced thermal management.
In this multi-component project series, Openex was contracted to fabricate and precision-machine critical heavy infrastructure for a major global steel manufacturing facility. The scope involved manufacturing custom components that process, transport, and roll raw steel from the furnace line directly to the finishing mill.
Custom Components Manufactured
🔥 Basic Oxygen & EAF Shells
Fabricated massive upper and lower furnace shells. These heavily welded structures required high-grade creep-resistant steel to maintain structural integrity despite continual expansion and contraction cycles.
🏗️ Scrap Charging Buckets & Ladles
Rolled and welded ultra-thick carbon steel plates to form massive liquid metal transport ladles and impact-resistant clam-shell charging buckets holding up to 150 tons of scrap steel.
🚂 Transfer Cars & Tundish Cars
Fully assembled mechanical base frames for heavy load transport on the foundry floor. Involved heavy structural cutting, sub-arc welding (SAW), and complete mechanical drivetrain assembly.
⚙️ Rolling Mill Housings (Stands)
Milled colossal steel billets using our massive 5-axis gantry CNC centers. Maintained strict parallelism and flatness tolerances to guarantee smooth sheet-metal production in the rolling mill.
Gallery: Heavy Steel Plant Engineering
Our Key Manufacturing Interventions
- 1.Thermal Stress Relieving: Because parts like rolling mill stands and furnace shells must undergo heavy repetitive stresses, all fabricated structural weldments went through precise Post-Weld Heat Treatment (PWHT) in our massive onsite industrial furnace to permanently lock in dimensional stability before CNC machining.
- 2.Full Penetration Heavy Welding: With plates often exceeding 100mm in thickness, root defects were entirely unacceptable. We utilized multi-pass Submerged Arc Welding (SAW), immediately followed by rigorous 100% Ultrasonic Testing (UT) to ensure compliance.