Competitiveness of products: A key to success in an incipient market economy

Abstract

The Borovichi Refractory Plant has organized the production of new advanced refractories, including graph z Re-containing articles for continuous casting of steel, a variety of mullite-corundum articles, mortars,<afid refractories for lining blast furnaces. The prospects for refractory production are considered. Properties of the new refractories and data on their use in the metallurgical industry are presented.The Borovichi Refractory Plant (BKO) is one of the five thousand enterprises that are leading the Russian economy. Information on the plant can be found in the national yearbook "Russian Blue Pages" of November 3, 1995.A leader of the refractory industry, the plant has a hundred-year tradition of manufacturing high-grade refractories, the best known of which are a variety of chamotte articles. Today the output of commercial chamotte refractories is reduced because of lower demand. In the last five years the traditional orientation of the plant has gradually changed and new technologies of advanced refractories have been introduced in order to satisfy the requirements of the changing structure of Russian industry.An analysis of the tendencies in the development of metallurgical production has shown the prospective direction of the production of refractories for steel casting. In the first stage of reorganization the plant installed shops for manufacturing corundum-graphite immersion nozzles, single-block stoppers, tubes for protecting metal streams, and nozzles for intermediate ladles and the corresponding brick.Shipment of sets of shaped refractories for specific parts or units is envisaged for the convenience of consumers.Despite the general decline in metallurgical production continuous casting of steel continues to develop and the BKO is ready to provide virtually any kind of shaped refractories of any standard size for continuous casting machines, including corundum-graphite refractories of hydrostatic shaping, namely, immersion nozzles, single-block stoppers, and tubes for protecting metal streams. Using an ASEA hydrostat (Fig. 1), the articles are fired in a tunnel kiln in a reducing medium. The fired articles are coated in order to prevent carbon from burning off during heating and operation of the articles. The quality is controlled both by the standard method involving checking samples of broken articles and by means of a special installation for x-ray monitoring of defects [ 1 ], which detecta hidden cracks and harmful inclusions. Nozzles for downstream and side stream technologies are produced.It is known that different parts of immersion nozzles operate under different conditions. In the slag belt the nozzle makes contact with fluorine-and alkali-containing slag [2], whereas the channel of an immersion nozzle is blocked by alumina-containing inclusions [3], which reduces the service life. The BKO has installed a technolog'y for manufacturing two-layer and three-layer immersion nozzles. The part of a three-layer nozzle (Fig. 2) that is subjected to strong thermal shocks is made of a material wit...