An obsolete rolling mill removed from the centre of a producing steel plant without a single hour of unplanned outage on adjacent lines.
- Client
- Integrated Steel Producer
- Location
- Jharkhand, India
- Duration
- 11 months
- Material handled
- 18,400 t
A complete hot rolling mill complex — reheat furnace, mill stands, run-out table, coil handling and the enclosing 34-metre building frame — dismantled inside a fully operational integrated steel plant, with two live production lines running within twenty metres throughout.
Scope of works
- Reheat furnace strip-out and refractory removal
- Mill stand and drive train dismantling
- Run-out table and coil handling system removal
- 34 m steel building frame demolition
- Foundation and pit removal to 6 m depth
- Alloy-grade segregation and recovery routing
The mill sat between two producing lines that could not be stopped. Any uncontrolled release of material, dust ingress into the adjacent caster, or interruption of the shared utility corridor running along the mill's north elevation would have halted production across the plant.
The building frame carried an overhead crane rail that had been modified at least twice since original construction, and none of the modifications appeared on the drawings. Load paths could not be assumed from the record set.
The reheat furnace retained refractory with a confirmed hazardous content, requiring licensed removal and clearance certification before any structural work could start in that bay.
We began with a full structural resurvey, establishing actual load paths in the modified crane rail structure and identifying three members whose removal would have destabilised the frame mid-sequence. Temporary propping was designed and installed before any release.
The work front was hard-segregated from both live lines with sheeted scaffold screens and a continuous atomised misting curtain, with dust monitored at the caster intake against a threshold agreed with plant operations.
Refractory removal was executed by a licensed specialist under a separate controlled scope, with clearance certification issued for each bay before our structural crews entered. Sequencing kept our teams productive in other bays throughout that period.
The utility corridor was surveyed, re-routed in a planned 14-hour window agreed nine weeks in advance, and physically protected for the remainder of the programme.
Alloy grades were separated at the work front — mill roll material, drive components and structural sections all routed independently rather than consolidated as mixed heavy melt.
18,400 t
Material recovered
96%
Diverted from landfill
Zero
Unplanned outages caused
Zero
Lost-time injuries
3 weeks early
Delivered against programme
Equipment mobilised against the engineered method for this programme. Where the correct machine was not in our own fleet, it was brought in rather than substituted.
- 65 m high-reach demolition excavator
- 450 t crawler crane
- Hydraulic shear and pulveriser attachments
- Material handlers with orange-peel grabs
- Atomised dust suppression cannons
If this looks like your asset, we should talk.
Send us the structure, the environment around it and the date you need it gone. We will come back with a method.