OREANDA-NEWS. June 23, 2008.  From May 20 till May 22 GMP JSC finishing its first year within ESTAR Metallurgical Holding organized a large presentation of its ball-rolling division and of the new technology for “grinding body of the 21st century” production.

In addition to traditional customers from Novokuznetsk and Topki, as well as good partners from Stroyservis CJSC they invited representatives of companies showing interest to steel grinding balls of higher volume hardness. This product that we have witnessed to reach the world class is a top brand of the refurbished Gurievsk Metallurgical Plant, it is also well known abroad  - from Ukraine and Kazakhstan to Mongolia and Latvia.

Today the GMP Conference Hall is a place for the meeting of guests not only from the vast Russia: the ball of Gurievsk has drawn attention of Novokuznetsk, Altai, Yakutia and Belgorod cement producers, ore processing companies, very important capital city corporations Promco and Soyuzmetalloresurs, and, which is mostly prominent, of “foreigners” from Donetsk – the representatives of Energoprogress CJSC.

The Managing Director of Gurievsk Metallurgical Plant JSC Mr. Alexander Studenov in his short introductory speech said a very important thing: ball-rolling products will achieve the best world specimens’ quality within several next years.

Dr. Igor Matveev, Technical Department Manager, enlarged on the history of ball-rolling technology at Gurievsk plant. We used to forge and stamp grinding balls, and GMP used to produce them from common carbon imported blanks. So far  in our country it has been acceptable and sufficient to roll balls of wastes of rail and bearing balls production, and to apply our own “Soviet” standard to them.

Nowadays the world market is very tough about the balls quality and, hence, their chemical composition and quenching: today grinding bodies shall be heat-treated not on the surface only, but through the entire body and have minimum 65 units of volume hardness (note that a common ball of the previous century could hardly be heat-treated to up to 50 units and on the surface only). This is the reason why the experts of the plant  took the specimens of the balls from the leading world producers, sliced them with the help of the up-to-date tools, and examined thoroughly to avoid “inventing a bicycle”, as engineer Matveev said. The conclusion was simple: world quality balls can be made only of alloy steel with a complete heat treatment cycle.

It was high time for us to make sure that our plant  has all preconditions for entering the world ball rolling “super-league”. Chief Engineer Mr. Sergey Vorobei and the Head  of the Ball-Rolling Shop Mr. Alexander Vasilkov with the assistance of Production Deputy Director Mr. Vladimir Dvorianchikov and the Technical Department Manager Mr. Igor Matveev showed the guests and reporters all the stages of steel conversion to the “ball of the future”.

First we saw how the alloy steel is born in Siemens-Martin furnace, and this, as the Siemens-Martin shop manager Mr. Andrey Kholin explained, ensures success of a “super ball” production. Though the alloy formula is still being developed and the experiment is at the final stage (micro alloying – deep desulfitation (sulfer content reduction) of the melt, combination of additives of ferrosilicium, chromium, manganese, titan, vanadium, etc.), and each melt requires much more labor, time and risk to compare with section rolling, nevertheless, the chemical content of the Gurievsk “solid body” is steadily moving to optimum.

A quiet “theoretical” break was a visit to the central plant  lab equipped with the up-to-date tools for analysis and control of metal molecular structure. The Chief Engineer, Sergey Vorobei invited the most curious among the guests to have a look at a 500-fold microscope and to compare a common Grade 3 steel with alloy steel. The difference is drastic even for an amateur (pity that a special camera is required for microphotography): carbon steel looks lighter, marble-loose, whereas alloy steel is dark and dense spiny.

Rolling mills were the next stop; here the profile blank is rolled to balls of various cross section. This stage is intermediate but very important, which is shown in its name: from “long” rolling steel turns directly into ball-rolling.

Finally, the actual target of our “plunge” into the new technology was Shop #1 with ball-rolling mills and then Shop #2 with a balls backing train installed a bit more than half a year ago. Shop Manager, Aleksander Vasilkov showed us the sacred place – the temper furnace control room, where in indication windows the temperature is displayed for the entire train from 207 to 211°С; heating is controlled to the tenths of a degree.

The most interesting for the guests  was the final products test area: here a hammer strikes again and again against a random ball from each packing at 1600 kJ. The engineers gave an indulgent smile, when asked to convert a special value to tons and explained that the ball fabricated under common technology would look worse, whereas this one made of allow steel stood 90 critical impacts that was the master standard for the fifth elite group of strength. Nearby there is a ball fatigue testing bench: a ball shall be dropped 2000 times from a several meters height and a reference measurement shall give a value within a millimeter parts tolerance. In this case Gurievsk ball will work for a long time grinding ore or the components of the cement mixture to complete abrasion.

When back in a conference hall, the guests asked Igor Matveev and Sergei Vorobei plenty of special questions that turned into a hot discussion. A guest from Belgorod, Mr. Sergei Bogomazov, expressed a doubt: “Of course, we trust your quality! However we must check! Sometimes it happens that the first lot of balls exactly meets the order requirements, and later the specifications qualities sometimes go down…” Mr. Vorobei answered::” Please, order the specifications you need. And the guarantee of the required quality will be our product brand which, I confess, has not been registered yet”.

So there is no doubt: there will be plenty of orders for the high strength Gurievsk ball, as the guests had a chance to make sure that it is not “a trial ball” but an actual competitor to 30 – 40 year-old foreign technologies, and it is a challenge to  the world ball-rolling “super-league”.