Development of Steelmaking Processes for Producing Various High-Quality Steel Grades at Yawata Works

In the early 1980s, when all of the ironmaking and steelmaking plants at Yawata Works were transferred from the Yawata area to the Tobata area, three steelmaking plants had been producing various type of steel grades, such as sheets, electrical steels, rails, shapes, pipes and stainless steels. After that, it became necessary to meet the growing demand for producing high-grade steel and to restructure the production process by reducing the number of blast furnaces. Therefore, new technologies have been actively developed and introduced to drastically improve the productivity and the steelmaking technologies. These measures enabled us to streamline the production facilities and to establish a highly-efficient steelmaking process which can offer a wide variety of high-grade steel.