Agra body, UK firm tie up for CNG-based furnaces

For the reeling foundry industry of Agra, this could be a welcome note. After the repeated failure of CNG-based cupola furnaces developed by the National Metallurgical Laboratory at Jamshedpur to deliver the optimum performance, Agra industrialists have tied up with a UK-based company to set up at least a dozen pollution-free CNG-based cupola furnaces.

The new furnace is expected to reduce the iron casting costs by almost 40 per cent, while obliterating the use of industion furnaces altogether.

An MoU was signed between the Agra Iron Founders Association and Richard Taft of Cokeless Cupola Ltd UK on Tuesday in Kolkata in which, Cokeless Cupola Ltd will set up about a dozen cupola furnaces at the foundry units in Agra, each costing almost 20 lakhs, over the coming one year.

Talking to Business Standard, Amar Mittal, president, Agra Iron Founders Association, said the Agra foundry industry was the largest such concentration of foundry units in the entire North India but after the use of coking coal was banned in the furnaces of the foundry units by the Supreme Court owing to pollution concerns, this industry was going through a bad patch and a large number of units had shut down for want of pollution free furnace technology.

About a couple of years back, he said, the National Metallurgical Laboratory at Jamshedpur had come up with a solution to the problems of Agra industrialists by evolving a CNG based Cupola furnace but after repeated field trials at various foundry units of the town, it was found that the furnace developed by NML was not financially viable as a lot of raw metal was wasted in the casting process and the resulting casts were of extremely low quality.

A few months later, some local industrialists also tried to develop an indigenous cupola furnace though that too, did not deliver the optimum results, forcing the Agra foundry industry to look for foreign help in order to upgrade its furnace technology and survive in these difficult times.

He said that in January, a few local industrialists met Richard Taft from Cokeless Cupola Ltd. UK, in a seminar in Mumbai. Incidentally, he said, Cokeless Cupola Ltd. was the pioneer of Cupola furnace technology in the world and so far, it had refrained from giving its technology to any third world country for the fear of tech-piracy. But during a subsequent meeting with the Agra industrialists, Mr. Taft agreed to provide the local foundry industry with the technology for cokeless cupola furnace.

On Tuesday, he said, the Agra Iron Founders Association signed an MoU with the company in Kolkata for setting up atleast 11 cupola furnaces in the town over the coming one year with the first furnace being installed at Anil Metal Industries on which, work shall begin in the coming 15-20 days and the furnace shall be operational by October this year.

Later, if requirement was posted by some more foundry units for the furnace, more furnaces could be setup by the company after the signing of a fresh MOU.

According to Mittal, the cost of the first furnace could come around Rs 26-27 lakh and it had been subsidized by 50 percent by USAID while the Rs. 80 lacs for tech-transfer shall also be borne by the agency.

He said that installation of Cupola furnaces at the metal casting units of the town shall bring a tremendous reduction in the Suspended Particulate matter (SPM) based pollution that shall be restricted to barely 150 µgm / cu.m. that was well within the guidelines set by the Central Pollution Control Board for such furnaces.