Hot metal quality improvement in TATA steel: A decade long journey.

This article focuses on the control of hot metal quality—specifically silicon and sulfur content—in blast furnaces at Tata Steel, Jamshedpur, amid declining raw material quality over the past decade. It highlights the limitations of traditional temperature-based control methods and presents a statistical approach that optimizes slag chemistry, particularly increasing slag basicity (B2 > 1.05) and magnesium oxide (MgO) content (>8.7%), to simultaneously reduce silicon and sulfur levels in hot metal. The study demonstrates that this data-driven method improves process stability and hot metal quality despite variations in raw material impurities and operating conditions. The findings underscore the importance of slag composition control over temperature adjustments for sustainable blast furnace operation and enhanced steel manufacturing competitiveness.