On December 22, Austria-based giant engineering and plantmaking company Siemens VAI Metals Technologies (Siemens VAI) announced that within four weeks it has put into operation four continuous slab casters, comprising a total of seven strands, at Chinese steelmaker Zhangjiagang Rong Sheng Co. Ltd. (ZRS). The three two-strand casters and the single-strand thick-slab caster are equipped with modern key components and technological packages to enable ZRS to cast high quality slabs for a multitude of industrial applications.
Each two-strand caster is capable of casting 1.9 million metric tons of slabs per year with a thickness of 170 or 200 mm and in widths ranging from 850 to 1,600 mm. In addition, the single-strand caster is designed to produce two million metric tons of slabs per year in thicknesses of 220, 250 and 320 millimeters and in widths ranging from 1,500 to 2,300 mm.
Siemens VAI received the four caster orders in July 2007. The value of the orders is a mid-double-digit million euro figure. Zhangjiagang Rong Sheng Co. Ltd., a subsidiary company of the Jiangsu Shagang Group, produces approximately 23 million metric tons of crude steel per year. It is thus the largest privately owned steelmaker in China and also the country's leading producer of electrical steel. During the past years, the Zhangjiagang plant in Jiangsu Province has been continually expanded in order to increase capacity.