Achieving an important milestone towards the completion of its modernisation and expansion programme, SAIL’s Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP) has blown in the blast furnace (BF) number 8 –Mahamaya successfully.

It is the first step towards commissioning of Mahamaya which has a useful volume of 4,060 cubic metres and capacity of producing 8,030 tonnes of hot metal per day which means 2.8 million tonnes annually.

With the new furnace on-stream, SAIL BSP’s hot metal capacity will go up to 7.5 million tonnes per annum from the present production level of around 5 MT.

The blast furnace no. 8 has various new generation technological features like cast-house and stock house dedusting system, top pressure recovery turbine (TRT), pulverised coal injection, modern heat transmission system through carbon block, ceramic cup and SGI & cu-staves and other state-of-the-art energy-efficient and pollution control equipment including waste heat recovery system.

SAIL is substantially increasing its saleable steel capacity and is targeting to increase sales volume by 10 percent every year from the 14 MT in FY 2017. The addition of BSP’s blast furnace in SAIL’s production capacity is a milestone and solid step to achieve that mark.

SAIL Chairman PK Singh, said that, “The entire SAIL team is making tremendous efforts and results are quite visible also in all areas like production, revenues, cost of production, quality, our projects, our market share.”