The Chollima Steel Complex is widely known as the place where the flames of collective innovation movement flared up in the DPRK.

Its employees initiated the collective innovation movement by helping and leading one another forward during the post-war rehabilitation period and roused the whole country to a new revolutionary upsurge in the 2000s.

The complex intends to remarkably boost steel production as compared to before during the period of a new five-year plan for national economic development.

“The complex set a goal of putting production on a normal footing by technically perfecting the steel production system of our own style and readjusting and reinforcing production processes this year, and is directing primary attention to them,” said chief engineer Song Myong Ho (pictured).

According to him, they are now engaged in shortening the melting time and lowering norms for power consumption per unit by furthering the oxygen-pulverized coal injection technical process.

The complex is pushing the modernization project of the process after completing the construction of a refractory production base with an annual capacity of 5 000 tons last year.

It is also pressing in a planned way the work of equipping itself with a new type of continuous ingot steel-making machine and up-to-date ladle refining furnace in order to produce different kinds of alloy steel qualitatively, while lowering the production costs of steel.

“It is no exaggeration to say that the steel output of the complex depends on the UHP electric arc furnace,” said Pak Il Sin, manager of the steel workshop.

It has recently introduced different technical innovation plans to increase steel output.

First, it applied an oxygen-pulverized coal injection technology to shorten the melting time from 30 minutes to one hour and save scores of kWh per ton.

It introduced a continuous charge method into the steel-making process based on reduced pellets.

It also introduced other technical innovation plans including those of improving melting technical indices by dint of foaming powder injection and of raising the quality of molten iron by introducing a continuous casting injection method to prevent secondary oxidization.

The workshop has overfulfilled its monthly production quotas this year.

The industrial technology research institute plays fundamental role in solving scientific and technological problems arising in steel production and modernization projects of the complex.

“We often hold a technical conference and technical course for their introduction after selecting research tasks for each office badly needed for production site. In this course, we introduced several research findings into practice to ensure the quality and quantity of steel production and save lots of funds,” said director Ri Kwang Hwi.

In recent years, the institute developed locally-abundant bearing bushes for the rolling process and 6 000-ton press to replace it with previously imported tin, while bringing out a high-quality coating material of welding rod.

It also established a process of baking different kinds of fire-bricks to make it possible to produce quality fire-bricks with high refractoriness with the help of anthracite gas abundant in the country.

The father of Ji Jong Ho, senior engineer of the steel workshop, worked as a smelter for decades at the Chollima Steel Complex.

“My father used to tell me that I should support the country with steel production. So I’ve become a smelter,” said Ji Jong Ho.

After being a smelter as intended by his father, he majored in metallurgy in the study-while-you-work system while working hard to learn skills from experienced smelters.

Starting his career as a smelter, he became a technical instructor of his workteam, chief of electric furnace No. 5 and the first head of UHP electric arc furnace in 2008.

The technical innovation plans he has so far studied and introduced included dozens in kind, such as those of improving the method of laying a bed of UHP electric arc furnace, remodelling the nozzle for a tapping hole of the UHP electric arc furnace, and establishing a ladle refining process based on argon gas injection and a heating process of pouring ladle by oxygen-pulverized coal combustion.

He has spared nothing to improve the performance of UHP electric arc furnace and increase its output since 2012 when he was appointed to be the senior engineer in charge of production and technical affairs of the steel workshop.