New track for coke plant filling machine
Perfect teamwork made it possible to replace the track of the coke oven battery at Hüttenwerke Krupp-Mannesmann (HKM) in Duisburg-Hüttenheim in record time.
Coke is made around the clock at the plant, where the production volume amounts to over one million tonnes per year.
Filling the 70 ovens is a crucial step in producing the coke and two filling machines are at work day and night for this purpose. They travel back and forth along the top of the battery on two fixed rails and tip the coal into the chambers through the top of the furnace. To make sure the ovens continue to be filled smoothly in future, the 140-meter-long rails were successfully replaced in March. The installation took just under twelve hours, involving 50 employees from the Plant Technology unit together with site manager Michael Lindtner from thyssenkrupp MillServices & Systems.
A total of five mobile cranes (2 x 400 tonnes, 2 x 250 tonnes and 1 x 160 tonnes) and three mobile gantry cranes (3 x 5 tonnes) were required to install the new rails, each of which weigh around 67 tonnes.
However, before the new rails could be installed, the old ones had to be cut into individual sections and prepared for removal.