Another RSP furnace faces breakdown

ROURKELA: Efforts of the RSP to return to the profit zone have received a fresh setback after the Blast Furnace (BF)-V suffered production loss with another breakdown on Sunday.Sources said at around 7 pm on Sunday, the blower pipe of Tuyer 21 of BF-V (Durga) stopped working with a burst due to operational fault. Due to gravity and pressure difference inside the furnace, all 36 tuyers were jammed with slag.

On the day, the BF-V reported production of about 3000 tonne of hot metal instead of 8,000 tonne. They claimed that the total restoration may take another four days. At present, the Net Sales Realisation (NSR) of RSP is good, but such breakdowns have affected hot metal production. Unavailability of gas as fuel from the BF affected production of RSP’s other units, including Hot Strip Mill, Plate Mill, New Plate Mill. The Steel Melting Shop-2 also stopped production on Monday due to unavailability of hot metal.

Management sources said restoration work on the damaged tuyer and blowpipe started immediately. The furnace is expected to resume operation on Tuesday. To utilise the downtime of Blast Furnace-5, pending capital repair, long shutdown jobs in other units like Sinter Plant-3, Caster-1 of Steel Melting Shop-II and New Plate Mill have been lined up. This will save the shutdown time required in February 2018. In Blast Furnace-5, preventive maintenance jobs in stock house, slag granulation plant and pig Casting, which were lined up to be taken up during early February, are being completed now. As a result, the cumulative shutdown duration planned in February 2018 will not be required.

RSP insiders said since its commission in 2014, the BF-V had faced 18 major and minor breakdowns and was down for at least 15 days in May, 2017.While after prolonged period of loss making, the RSP was doing very well in the past few months, this breakdown would affect its profit prospects.