Super-sized Furnace
POSCO began the fourth life of No. 3 Blast Furnace at Pohang Works as a super-sized furnace after successfully completed its 102-day repair.
On June 6, POSCO held a ceremony to fire the blast furnace at Pohang Works with the participation of about 200 employees of the POSCO Group including chairman Kwon Oh-jun and Lee Kang-deok, mayor of Pohang.
The No. 3 Blast Furnace at Pohang Works, which has been repaired and renovated since February, expanded from 4,350 square meters to 5,600 square meters, making it the world's fifth largest blast furnace with a production capacity of 14,000 tons per day. As a result, the completion of the project enabled POSCO to operate five super large blast furnaces with a total capacity of more than 5,500 cubic meters, thus solidifying its position as the world's leading steel company.
Currently, as for a super large blast furnace with a volume of more than 5,500㎥, POSCO has five super large blast furnaces such as Gwangyang 1st Blast Furnace (6,000㎥) which is the world’s biggest, Pohang 3rd (5,600㎥) and 4th Blast Furnaces (5,500㎥). Worldwide, super large blast furnaces total 14 including four in Japan, three in China, one in Russia, and one in Germany.
Based on POSCO’s experience in repairing blast furnaces 28 times, POSCO applied technology to predict the blast furnace’s life and to automatically control the internal state of the blast furnace from the design stage, the steelmaker built infrastructure to monitor the internal and external conditions of the blast furnace from the beginning of its operation and be able to take one step towards a 'smart blast furnace' that will utilize artificial intelligence in the future
POSCO’s Pohang Blast Furnace 3 laid the foundation for the development of POSCO and the demand industry by producing a total of 119 million tons of fused iron over three periods since it first operation in 1978.