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Research and development features high amongst the list of priorities of the Japanese steel industry. Comwith the United States and Europe, allocates a higher budget for R&D, around 1.04% of turnover. In of budget per research worker, the industry's level of budget is Y27.9M or £65,000. Of this budget taking the in 1980 for the fi ve leading steel mak5% is allocated to basic studies, 30% to application, 56% to development and 9% on other projects. A measure of the success of R & D activities has been in the level of patents filed and in the 1980 ranking by industry in Japan, the steel industry was in sixth place in terms of registrations disclosed.
At the present time the Japanese steel is tackling four main R&D areas. are:
1 Technological developments related to resources and energy consumption.
2 Product quality and expansion of new applications.
3 The development of fused technologies.
4 The strengthening of basic studies.
Looking briefly at some of these points, whole iron and steelmaking process comprises repeated heating and cooling cycles. From this the omission of some processes and the continuous operation of others can produce tremendous energy savings and thus the recovery and re-use of medium and low temperature waste heat is an important subject for future study as is the recovery of waste heat from combined systems. Looking at raw materials, work here involves the development of new processes to permit the effective use of pulverised ore, non-sintered ores and steam coals as well as other technologies which will allow the substitution for and/or the reduction in the consumption of rare materials such as nickel and molybdenum. The development of fused technology requires the marriage between the metallurgical knowledge and functions and those of the electronics and measurement factions to allow further instrumentation and analysis of the various processes as they take place rather than the instrumentation to measure the quality of the product produced.
Blast Furnace Development
Turning nowtosomeof the particular areas of production within the Japanese industry, the blast furnace has seen a number of changes over the years. Today out of the 44 blast furnaces currently in operation in Japan 43 are now operated without oil and thus the industry has achieved an almost 100%...