Furnace systems for continuous copper rod production

In addition to the furnaces which have normally been used in the cable industry for decades, for annealing, pre-heating, tempering, galvanising, etc, in the past 20 years, cable manufacturers have been increasingly looking for a way of producing copper rod themselves. For this purpose they had to examine furnace types needed for melting the raw copper. Table 1 shows by the example of Contirod lines, as they are known, how this tendency has progressed in recent years and that more and more operators of these lines are actually cable factories. Since 1987 eight lines have been constructed by cable factories, while only four lines are operated by copper refiners. There are basically three types of furnace suitable for continuous casting and rolling plants. Figure 1 shows which of the different types of furnaces are best applied to the following casting and rolling process.