For Ovako, a centuries old manufacturer of engineering steel, innovative approaches to producing their product has taken the form of electrifying their roller hearth furnaces over the course of the past decade.
The process of converting to electric heating began in 2014, each furnace installed with up to 86 Tubothal® metallic heating elements from Kanthal. Now, 14 roller hearth furnaces are electrified. The estimated CO2 savings is around 1,400 to 2,000 tons per year per furnace.
“[In] our heat treatment shop in Hofors,” shares Anders Lugnet, a furnace technology specialist at Ovako (pictured above), “we originally had around 450 gas burners, and there was always a problem somewhere in one of them. Since replacing them with 300-odd Tubothal® elements, the daily maintenance is simply not there. Occasionally, an element needs to be replaced, but it is nothing compared to the way it was.”
He continues that, previously, NOx and CO2 emissions were problematic. But with green electricity, emissions are zero, and with no flue-gas losses, total efficiency has improved significantly.
You can read more about this gas burner to electrification retrofit piece of news here: “Clean and Simple: How Electric Heating Transformed Ovako’s Heat Treatment Furnaces”
