GHI will inaugurate in Sidenor Basauri two heat treatment lines for steel bars, 130m long with high flexibility and 4.0 connectivity.

The project is an strategic order for GHI as it is the first line of the new generation of heat treatment furnaces with significant technological improvements. The project will be the first to be built  under the lean strategy philosophy that was implemented in our workshop.

The project consists of two 100 meter long furnaces with their respective entry and exit tables and cooling systems, which add another 30 meters to each line, in whose design GHI has collaborated intensively with the Sidenor.

Jose Berasategui, General manager of GHI, points out that these equipment represent a significant advance due to the great operational flexibility of this solution, which is based on the high speed for configuration and parameter changes, both in permanence times and temperatures.

With these heat treatment furnaces, Sidenor will expand the range of bar qualities with different combinations of treatments (globular, isothermal and subcritical annealing; annealing; tempering; distensioning; normalizing and cooling) and programs, which will move between the shortest 6-hour range and the longest 28-hour range.

The furnaces will be able to heattreat packages from 5 to 10 tons of steel bars from 3 to 12 meters long and diameters from 20 to 120 millimeters. These bars will be automatically fed and aligned across the width of the loading table, improving operator safety.

The target is to have the two lines fully operational by April 2020 and the equipment replacement to take place within tight deadlines and without production downtime. The first heat treatment line is already in the assembly phase in Sidenor, and the second in the testing period in our workshop.

The article was published in Estrategia Empresarial.