[2017-06-27]









Posters showing photos of the top six scientists and technicians in 2016 catch the eyes of passersby. People look up to them with respect for their distinguished contributions to the development of the country’s science and technology, economic growth and improvement of the people’s livelihood.
Among them is Kim Sung Nam, a 72-year-old researcher at the Hwanghae Iron and Steel Complex. Not many people know that he was once a smelter.
He spent his childhood seeing the metamorphosis of the complex.
At that time workers of the then Hwanghae Iron Works built a 100-ton open-hearth furnace in a short time on the site of the 50-ton one which was destroyed by the US bombing during the Fatherland Liberation War, thereby demonstrating the spirit and mettle of the Korean people in the postwar rehabilitation. Their heroic spirit prompted him to develop a dream of becoming a smelter.
It was not long after he began to work as a smelter that he was told that President Kim Il Sung visited the factory and gave earnest instructions that in the future iron should be produced by relying on locally available raw materials instead of coke to meet the country’s specific conditions.
Sung Nam made up his mind to translate his intention into reality even by devoting his whole life. He entered the factory college and majored in metallurgical engineering. After graduation he buckled down to the development of a new iron production method.
The research into coke-free iron production was an untrodden path in the country and so it was that much difficult. But after years-long painstaking efforts he invented a low blast furnace that could produce pig iron with locally abundant anthracite, the first breakthrough in coke-free iron-making.
Encouraged by the success, he then undertook a project in the 1990s to put the pig iron production in oxygen-blast furnace on an industrial basis.
The pig iron production method was being introduced in countries with no or little coke. However, many were skeptical about it.
But anyone had to undertake the task as it was the best way to carry out the instructions of President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il and establish the Juche character in the metallurgical industry.
He chose it by himself and intensified research to completely localize the pig iron production method based on locally abundant anthracite, iron ore and limestone, in conformity with the actual conditions of the country.
During the research he risked his life exposing himself to treacherous experiments. He felt shortage of equipment and materials in building a test furnace and suffered repeated failures in the test.
Yet he did not give up. Instead, he worked harder to solve lots of problems arising in the trial run of the oxygen-blast furnace, and finally succeeded in the test production. Without resting on his laurels, he worked out technical directions for reconstruction and operation geared to the modernization of the oxygen-blast furnace, prepared a syllabus for technical course by himself to train technical personnel and intensified technological exchange with relevant sectors.
In the course of this, the oxygen-blast furnace was internally designed to be simple in structure and easy to operate, resulting in the success in the pig iron production by the furnace at a try in 2015. The product of his patriotic devotion opened a bright prospect for the radical increase in the iron production.
He was awarded Kim Jong Il Prize, PhD in engineering and February 16 Science and Technology Prize in recognition of his dedication to the development of the country’s metallurgical industry.
He still puts his heart and soul into completing the Juche iron production method.
 
By Jong Hwa Sun PT