Belt casting project offers prospect of advanced steels and steel alloys

Now an EPSRC-funded project, led by Warwick Manufacturing Group at Warwick University, is investigating the use of a new technology that could dramatically reduce the cost and amount of energy consumed by the process.

The Assure 2 project, which also involves McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Tata Steel, could allow new advanced steels and steel alloys to be produced using the technology, which is known as belt casting.

In conventional steel production, the molten material is cast into continuous slabs of around 250 millimetres in thickness. These are cut into lengths, hot rolled, and then cold rolled, ultimately producing a strip of around 1mm thickness.

This is extremely energy-intensive, and steel makers have been investigating ways to improve the efficiency of the process by directly casting a thin strip of steel, according to Prof Claire Davis at WMG, who is leading the project.

“In belt casting you cast a strip directly onto a moving belt,” said Davis. “This strip is around 5-10mm thick, so there is very little rolling required to produce a product for the automotive industry, for example.”