1. Manufacturing

1.1 Hot process: steelmaking and hot rolling

In the global steel industry, the production of grain-oriented steel has been concentrated on the cast-iron route (BOF converter) to the detriment of the scrap route (EAF furnace) for economic and technical reasons, and more specifically to meet the demand for high-purity steels. The use of continuous casting processes for grain-oriented steel became widespread in the late 1970s. Compared with ingot casting, slab casting brought economic and technical improvements, in particular homogeneity of slab chemical composition in the longitudinal direction. This process is shown in figure...