Recycling : Panizzolo: Helping Mughal Steel industries move forward

Based in Lahore, Mughal Iron & Steel Industries Ltd is a leading steel company in Pakistan, offering a wide range of products to meet the needs of various industries. With a history of excellence spanning more than 50 years, it is dedicated to providing high-quality and durable steel products.

Global demand for steel is constantly increasing, fuelled by economic growth, ur- banisation and infrastructure needs. But at the same time, steel companies must address challenges such as production efficiency, cost control and environmental sustainability. To this end, steel companies are always seeking innovative solutions to optimise production processes, enhance product quality, reduce costs and meet growing market demands.

Mughal Steel’s choice of Panizzolo as a partner was driven by the latter’s solid reputation, high-quality technologies and customer-orientated approach. The partnership has proved instrumental in addressing operational challenges and capitalising on improvement opportunities, enabling the steel giant to gain a significant enhancement of scrap treatment processes, increased recovery of secondary raw materials and improved operational efficiency as a result of the innovative solutions and advanced technologies provided by Panizzolo.As Mughal Steel sources raw materials from scrap from around the world, it was crucial to improve its processes to ensure optimal resource management. Among the plannedinvestments, Mughal Steel focused on the treatment of scrap from electric motors; it was of vital importance to introduce a dedicated grinding and separation plant to maximise metal recovery from these scraps and to enhance the overall process yield.

Mughal Steel conducted extensive market research, with particular emphasis on two countries – Germany and Italy – which are known for their leadership role in recycling plants and for offering cutting-edge technologies and innovative solutions.

In addition to Panizzolo’s solid reputation within the scrap industry, key reasons that led Mughal Steel to choose this Italian partner included its technologically-advanced solutions designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of scrap treatment processes.Furthermore, Panizzolo’s solutions cover the entire treatment cycle from grinding to material separation, ensuring a continuous and controlled flow. The flexibility of the solutions on offer allowed Mughal Steel to adapt the processes to the specific needs and characteristics of the scrap electric motors to be treated, thereby maximising metal recovery and optimising overall yield.

Use of Panizzolo’s solutions enabled Mughal Steel to obtain secondary raw materials of an excellent quality, with a high content of valuable metals and low levels of contamination, thus permitting Mughal Steel to improve the quality of its steel products and ensure compliance with customer specifications.

anizzolo’s approach was based on the use of established and tested technologies that the company has developed and perfected over the years. The plant at Mughal Steel consists of five treatment islands, each performing a specific phase in the grinding, selection and refining of electric motors, transforming them from scrap into secondary raw materials. The various treatment phases have been incorporated within an 8 000 sq metre building.

Island 1: In this primary grinding phase, electric motors weighing up to 40 kg are broken up so as to carry out a preliminary separation of the metals, distinguishing ferrous from non-ferrous.

Island 2: The main objective of this phase is to prepare material for subsequent prerefining.This secondary grinding process ensures that the material is reduced to the required size and characteristics for the next step, enabling optimal treatment. The materials are refined and separated from certain metal components that have completed the treatment cycle. A Panizzolo Mega 725 hammer mill is used to ensure efficient and precise grinding; equipped with a powerful 355 kW motor, this machine can handle up to 25 tonnes of material per hour.

Island 3: In the crucial pre-refining stage, the shredded scrap is prepared for subsequent stages of separation and refining using the Flex 800 hammer mill, which is known for its versatility. This stationary mill with an electrical power of 160 kW enables a production capacity of up to 8 tonnes per hour of ground outgoing material. The main objective of the pre-refining island is to separate any components that have completed the treatment cycle and to achieve an optimal particle size for the subsequent refining process.

Island 4: The dual plant line used for the refinement process is necessary to handle the high productivity from the previous stages. Each line consists of a pair of Panizzolo refining mills, offering numerous advantages in the treatment cycle through a specific design incorporating patented elements, special anti-wear castings and a high-quality structure that makes them extremely resistant to wear caused by steel and other abrasive materials.During this phase, material is granulated and valuable metals – including copper, aluminium, brass and steel – are separated from inert components using sorting towers and specialised density tables. This sorting and separation process transforms the material from waste into high-quality secondary raw material, ready to be reintroduced into the production cycle.

Island 5: The final island comprises an optical separator designed to valorise and separate copper from other metals such as brass, achieving a copper purity of approximately 98%.