Introduction

The growth of electric steel production around the world has been driven by lower investment, higher operational flexibility and easy adoptability to market demand on long or flat products of either plain carbon or alloy steels. Growth has been supported by updating installations and technologies to reduce the electric energy, electrode consumption and tap to tap time. Figure16. 1 shows the developments in

electric steelmaking technologies. Developments in EAF technologies are strongly supported by secondary steelmaking. One can note in the figure that the power consumption has decreased from 630 Kwh/ton of steel to 290kWh/ton. Similarly tap tp tap time has decreased from 180 minutes to 40 minutes and electrode consumption has decreased from arounf 6.2 kg/ton to as low as 1.2 kg/ton within the periods of representation in the figure. This became possible with the several simultaneous developments in the secondary steel-making method. Table shows the various developments.