ABSTRACT
The casting and rolling (CR) line is de ned in this chapter as a hot-strip production facility that comprises either a thin-or a medium-slab caster, slab-reheating furnace, and a hot rolling mill. The slab casters with the slab thickness range from 40 to 100 mm are de ned as the thin-slab casters, while the slab casters with the slab thickness range from 100 to 150 mm are de ned as the medium-slab casters. Liquid steel for the CR lines may come either from the electric arc furnaces (EAFs) or from the basic oxygen furnaces (BOFs). The CR lines are the main components of the minimill producing at steel products that, in addition to the CR lines, also contain melt shops. The most common minimills for at steel products became known as the compact strip production (CSP) plants [15,21,25,37,44,59,63,71,79,83,84]. The rst CSP plant, Nucor Steel, was built in 1969 in Crawfordsville, Indiana [15,63,84]. The original plant installation included a melt shop with two EAF and two ladle metallurgy furnaces, one thin-slab caster, a slab-reheat tunnel furnace, a tandem- nishing mill with four stands, a strip-cooling system, and one downcoiler.
