A coke oven battery was inaugurated, on Saturday, at the Rourkela Steel Plant as part of its Rs 12,000-crore ongoing modernisation programme.
Second of its kind in SAIL, the new battery, inaugurated by SAIL chairman C S Verma, is top charged having compound twin flue, under jet, regenerative heating with partial recirculation of waste gases, RSP sources said.
The total investment in entire coke oven battery complex was around Rs 1,400 crore.
The complex comprised a modern environment friendly new coke oven battery, coke dry cooling plant, coal handling plant and coal chemicals unit.
Post expansion, RSP would more than double its capacity from the current 2 million tonne to 4.5 mt of hot metal and commensurate increase in crude steel and saleable steel capacity.
With this key unit coming to stream, RSP has completed a major chunk of the projects activities.
Earlier, two key units - the new sinter plant and the raw material circuit of the ore bedding and blending plant Phase-II had already been made operational and were in the process of stabilisation.
Test and trial runs of new units like blast furnace-5, new slab caster in SMS-II and power blowing station were in progress and the units were likely to be put into operation soon, the sources added.
