On April 11th 2024 - 16 colleagues from mechanical and hydraulic design took part in a tour of the Dillinger Hütte plant.
Dillinger Hütte is one of the few active steel mills in Germany. It is one of the largest employers in Saarland and currently employs around 3,500 people at the Dillingen site.
After equipping themselves with flame-retardant clothing and a hard hat, they set off.
Mr. Engel, a retired and passionate former employee, gave our colleagues a competent and entertaining 3-hour tour of the 450-hectare site.
The site is the size of almost 643 soccer fields.
They were able to follow the route of the raw material from delivery in the company's own port, via the coking plant to the blast furnace.
Ore and coal are piled up and mixed at the port. Here, 180,000 tons of raw material were stored, enough for just 12 days of production.
The vertical continuous casting plant, with a vertical product generation of 17.5 m, was very impressive. Some of our colleagues struggled with their fear of heights. At the top, the liquid material is poured into the mold at more than 1,500°C.
"The long vertical "cooling" has various advantages in the structure of the finished product", explained Mr. Engel, "which can still reach around 900°C when the slabs burn off."
In the past, Dillinger Hütte has repeatedly set world records for slab thickness.
Most recently in 2017: the thickest slab in the world at 600 mm.
Over the past two decades, AG Dillinger Hüttenwerke has already invested heavily in environmental protection, but Dillinger Hütte is currently undergoing a transformation to green steel with an investment of around 3.5 billion euros. An extension is being built on 48 hectares.
The entire team was very impressed by the huge plant complex on which semi-finished products are produced with the highest precision.
