Recently, Magang Special Steel bearing steel for the first time to obtain access to railroad steel products, becoming the second domestic steel plant using the “vacuum degassing + continuous casting” process to produce steel for railroad wagon bearings.
From cars, high-speed rail, aircraft to instruments, machinery and equipment, all rotating machinery, are inseparable from a common core component – bearings. Bearing steel, the material required for manufacturing bearings, is directly related to the life and reliability of bearings, and is known as the “king of steel”.
At the beginning of this year, Masteel formed a team composed of professional and technical talents from the manufacturing management department, special steel company, technology center, marketing center and other departments to unite the strength of all parties to promote the project of “special steel key new product development and high-end user certification”. Forging bearing steel with “high purity” and “high uniformity” is the focus of the project team.
“Generally speaking, 8 ppm (1 ppm = one millionth) of steel is good steel, while the high-end bearings need 5 ppm of top steel.” Yin Defu, a researcher at the Technical Center of Masteel, introduced that they successfully produced top-grade bearing steel through countless purity, inclusions and segregation attack tests, and finally controlled the oxygen content in the steel stably below 5 ppm. From successful research and development to mass production, the problems that need to be solved are equally tricky. In the production of products, Special Steel Company repeatedly tried process innovations such as continuous casting superheat degree, and conducted several rounds of composition optimization tests, which comprehensively improved the comprehensive performance of the products.
Zhang Shushan, deputy director of the production technology office of the special steel company, said, “At present, the steel we produce for railroad vehicle bearings, carbide mesh and band levels are better than the requirements of the relevant technical conditions of the national railway.” Creating value for users with high quality products and services is the direction of the team sales staff’s joint efforts. They formed a market development team to promote product application from the design source through market-oriented and regional advance intervention, and promote the internationally competitive Masteel special steel products to the design process of many vehicles and energy equipment to solve the “pain points” of customers. At the same time, we continue to develop new specifications to meet customers’ individual needs, and sales have increased by more than 10% year-on-year.
The story of bearing steel is just a microcosm of MISCO’s production and operation. In the first three quarters of this year, Masteel’s special steel products have been extended to the high-end industry chain, with a total of 11 high-end user certifications and 92,700 tons of new products sold.
Wang Kaizhong, chief researcher of special steel wire and bar product development, said: “In order to make the ‘Magang’ brand special steel into more customers, to a wider market, the next stage, we will work on the stability of the process and the personalization of the product, and strive for more high-end certification, firmly in the first echelon of the industry. “