Tata Steel Celebrates hundred-year saga of iron-making |
Written by Ganesh | |
Tuesday, 06 December 2011 | |
Jamshedpur: Tata Steel has completed 100 years of blast furnace operations. It was on December 2, 1911, that the plant at Jamshedpur became active when the blast furnace was blown for the first time. Steel production commenced a few weeks later on February 16, 1912. The Jamshedpur works — whose present capacity stands at 6.8 million tonnes per annum — is set to become a 10-million-tonne steel plant a few months from now. In the early years, the plant essentially consisted of a battery of 180 non-recovery coke ovens and 30 by-product ovens with a sulphuric acid plant and two blast furnaces, each of 350 tonnes per day capacity, and a 300-tonne hot metal mixer, four open hearth furnaces of 50-tonne capacity each, one steam engine driven 40-inch reversing blooming mill, one 28-inch reversing combination rail and structural mill with reheating furnaces and one 16-inch and two 10-inch rolling mills. In the early days, an average of 6,300 people were engaged daily at the works by the company and its contractors. |