Rourkela: The Rourkela Steel Plant, after augmenting its Special Plate Plant (SPP) capacity from 250 tonnes per month to 1000 tonnes following the installation of a new Quenching and Tempering (Q & T) furnace, has successfully carried out trial production of new grades like SAIL WR 400 (Q&T), ASTM 517 grade F(Q&T), ASTM 537 Class 2(Q&T), EN 10025-5 S690QL (Q&T) and IS 2002 Grade 2 & 3 (Furnace Normalized).

The RSP CEO, Ashwini Kumar, introduced the products of new grades to 12 key customers of the plant from southern India at a Customer Meet organised at Bengaluru, recently.  The major focus of the meet was to promote the special quality high value plates from New Plate Mill as well as the high strength Q & T plates being made through the State-of-the-art Roller quenching facility installed in the Special Plate Plant (SPP). The potential customers comprised mostly manufacturers of earth moving equipment, fabricated structures, heavy machinery.

“During the interaction sessions, the customers were informed about the new grades of plates being added to the product basket of RSP, their grades, specifications and usage. Detailed presentations were also made on various initiatives being taken right from steel making stage to the production of plates with stringent specifications”, said Plant’s executive director ( marketing) B.Chongdar. According to him some of the customers in turn showed interest in the products of RSP and placed trial orders.

RSP General Manager(PPC) C. Muthuswamy, DGM in-charge (SSP) S Ghoshal, DGM(NPM) Rajeev Ranjan, DGM(PPC) Sunita Singh, and DGM (SMS-2) TP Sivasankar were present at the customer meet.

The Q&T) facility has enabled RSP making defense grade plates, high strength plates that find application in earth moving equipments, structural plates, pre-engineered building, high pressure boiler vessel plates and penstock applications.

RSP’s focus on high value products has increased the value added steel production from 19.8% of the total dispatch of saleable steel in FY 17 to 22% in FY 18. This helped the plant improve its bottomline.