Moscow

RUSAL announced the start-up of a new casthouse at its Bratsk Aluminium Smelter. The casthouse is to produce multi-component alloys for sheet and foil production. Annual capacity at the facility is over 70 000 tons. Investments into the project amounted to US$2mln.

The investment project is a part of RUSAL’s larger programme to increase the share of value added products in its product mix, as well as to focus on increasing sales to end users. The alloy ingots produced at the Bratsk new casthouse are to be supplied to sheet and foil producers in South Korea, Germany, Greece and other countries. The start-up of the casthouse will help to raise annual alloy production volume at Bratsk to 100 000 in 2004, which is a 4 time increase over 2002.

A number of Russian and foreign engineering companies and institutes were involved in the project, including SibVAMI, VZTM (Irkutsk), Magnetohydrodynemics Center (Krasnoyarsk), Sibelectrotherm, Sinetic, Plibriko (Austria), Piroteck (USA), Kantal (Sweden).

The casthouse’s equipment includes a rotary alloying furnace with a 50-ton capacity and is the first design of its type in the Russian aluminium industry. The project is a major step within RUSAL’s investment program to increase value added casthouse product output  towards the goal of  50% of the product mix by 2009.

Source: RUSAL