BEST REFRACTORY PROJECT

No. 4 and 5 Walking Beam Furnaces — Local 4 Indiana/Kentucky

Signatory Contractor: Barton Malow Company

Northwest Indiana is the country’s top steel producing region, with US Steel and ArcelorMittal leading the way in 2020. As part of its Action 2020 Plan, ArcelorMittal invested $140 million into building two of the world’s largest walking beam reheat furnaces — the facility’s No. 4 and No. 5 furnaces located at its 80-inch Hot Strip Mill.

The scope of this project was immense. BAC signatory contractor Barton Malow and Local 4 Indiana/Kentucky members were responsible for the refractory installation of the two furnaces (each 210 feet in length), the waste gas duct and heat recuperators, and the dual 217-foot-tall refractory lined stacks.

The refractories included 308 tons of insulating and hard fire brick, 602 tons of castables, 544 fiber blanket modules and insulating boards, 2,800 pre-manufactured pipe shapes, and 260 tons of gunite.

Another element of the installation process was the welding of refractory anchors. The bricklayers were awarded all the anchor welding inside the furnace, gas-ducts, recuperators, and stacks. The number of refractory anchors were in the thousands, amounting to hundreds of craftworker hours.

Along with the scope and scale of this project, another challenge BAC members faced was segmentation of construction. Everything checkerboarded into small segments with firebreaks built into them to allow for better expansion and contraction of the materials to make them last longer. Nothing was continuous from floor to walls and roof; for example, one stack had more than 3,000 segments in it.

These furnaces can improve surface quality and production, producing up to 500 tons each per hour, a 40 percent increase in productivity. In building two of the world’s largest walking beam reheat furnaces, BAC members created the first of its kind for steel, and jobs, made here in North America.