A considerable achievement comes from the W1 Department. Piotr Miedziński, the head of the W1 department with a grain of salt describes a difficult project that has been completed:

“The nozzles that we produce are now shipped to customers all around the world. The only exception is Antarctica. There is a strong suspicion that the penguins living there simply do not need them. We can only believe that they will be convinced of our products in the future.”

Nozzle – what it actually is?

The zirconium insert or the zirconium nozzle is a very important component for customers, both from the safety and the steel production technology side.

Zirconium nozzles are made by powder pressing. As its name suggests the powder basis is (based on) zirconium oxide ZrO2. During the pressing process, the pressing pressure are over 40 tons. How much is it? Just imagine the fully loaded truck loaded on the area of 12 cm2.

After the pressing process, the element goes to the furnace. The next step is packing and then it finally goes to the customer.

In steel mills systems with zirconium nozzles are mounted in the tundish that is part of continuous casting machines. Steel with an extreme temperature up to 1560 °C flows through the insert for several to dozen hours. During its working cycle, the nozzle passes up to 200 tons of liquid steel. Such elements must be characterized by high resistance to erosion and temperature shrinkage in order to ensure the safety of employees and proper quality of final steel products like slabs.

The bore diameter of the nozzle, measured with an accuracy of hundredths of a millimetre, is the key parameter with colossal impact on the coordination of work in the mills as well as on the quality of steel. During the casting of steel, tundish plate with the insert can be replaced with a different diameter. It is the way how the casting speed is regulated. It is the most important casting parameter. The high accuracy of the diameter provides the comfort of adjusting the casting speed to the production conditions.

All of the above makes our client’s work smooth and easy.