Sheffield Forgemasters International has won two major contracts, worth £2.9 million in total, to make housings for the latest generation of rolling mills for the Indian steel industry.
The contracts will give two of the largest Indian steel companies, Jindal Steel and Essar Steel large scale plate rolling mills, allowing them to go head to head with the Chinese to feed increasing global demand for steel plate .
Sheffield Forgemast
ers is one of the few companies in the world with the engineering capacity to produce the mill housings, which are so big that they have to be made in sections.
When the mills are finished, the two Indian companies will be able to produce metal plate up to six metres (almost 20 feet) wide, double the conventional width.
Sheffield Forgemasters sales manager Terry Whaley said: "There are very few rolling mills of this size in the world. These contracts will therefore place Indian steel manufacture at the leading edge of global supply.
"The mills will weigh around 540 tons each when fully assembled, and we will manufacture and supply both the cast sectional housings and the forged back-up rolls."
Both mills conform to newly developed styles, creating larger plate to reduce the amount of welding required in large scale construction industries such as ship building.
Sheffield Forgemasters' chief executive, Dr Graham Honeyman, said: "It is good to know that British industry is creating engineering products to help India build on its economic growth. India's development in steel production almost mirrors that of China and the supply of these roller mills will close the gap even further."
Forgemasters' latest success comes ten months after the Brightside Lane company joined forces with Siemens VAI and AK Heavy Engineering – since renamed DavyMarkham – to create a 1,100 tonne mill stand for the Shagang steel company in China.
That mill is designed to produce plate up to five metres wide at a rate of more than seven metres a second, for shipbuilding, construction and civil engineering applications. Sheffield Business Park-based Siemens VAI designed the 1,100 tonne mill – the biggest of its kind at the time – while Forgemasters made the castings, capable of withstanding rolling forces of up to 10,000 tonnes, which were then machined at DavyMarkham's Darnall site.
More recently, Forgemasters and DavyMarkham joined forces to make castings for the largest ever hydraulic screw press, which was being built by SMS Eumuco of Leverkusen, Germany for an Austrian company, Bohler Schmiedetechnik, to make highly stressed structural aeronautical components from titanium, nickel-based alloys and special steels, for aircraft and jet engine manufacturers like Boeing, Airbus, General Electric and Rolls-Royce.
Roads in Sheffield had to be closed and night-time traffic diverted as the steel castings, each weighing around 350 tonnes or the equivalent of 45 London Routemaster buses, were hauled by 72-wheel transporters from Sheffield Forgemasters across town to the DavyMarkham engineering works.
