Mr. D. K. Maxwell has been appointed to the newly created position of sales manager for Southern Africa for The Southern Cross Steel Company (Pty.) Ltd., a company in the Middelburg Steel and Alloys group.
Mr. Maxwell started his career at Southern Cross as a development engineer. In 1969 he took an MBA course at the University of Cape Town, returning to marketing positions with companies in the Barlow-Rand group.
The Union Carbide process
Avesta Jernverks AB – a member of the Axel Johnson Group and Sweden’s largest producer of stainless steel – has signed a licence agreement with the American company Union Carbide for utilizing this company’s method for refining stainless steel with a mixture of oxygen and argon in a converter. Avesta intends to install a 50-ton converter in an extended part of the existing steel melting plant.
The new process has awakened great interest due to its advantages over other alternative processes. In addition to considerably increasing the production of the existing furnaces the method provides possibilities to control the analysis of the steel with high accuracy. Extremely low carbon contents are easy to obtain and certain impurities such as sulphur and oxygen can easily be brought down to very low values. Furthermore the method is very well suited for highly developed automatic process control through which a high and uniform quality of the steel is ensured.
The new equipment is planned to be ready for operation during 1972.
