Keeping The Fires Burning

Blast Furnace Reline
Pittsburgh, PA

The success of steel plants is often measured across decades, as systematic capital improvements are made to keep a blast furnace operational and competitive. 

From May 2012 through November 2014, Songer performed a complete reline of the #1 Blast Furnace as part of a 15-year operational campaign for the U.S. Steel Edgar Thomson Plant in Pittsburgh PA. 

The project entailed installing a brand new hot blast stove, hot main, repairs to two additional stoves, and a furnace refractory reline, including hearth wall tuyere’s, armor and furnace top. In addition, significant repairs were made to the material delivery systems, gas systems and air systems. 

Songer handled all project planning, union crafts, and installation using an innovative approach of working on one stove during operations from multiple levels utilizing an elevator feed system. As a result, we minimized the cost impact of the 58-day outage by reducing planned number of project days—and significantly shortened our job time (and comparative cost) from our last reline of this stove in 1997.