Navy makes high-strength steel for warships

Indigenous manufacturing of India's largest warship — the 37,500-tonne aircraft carrier INS Vikrant — has ended the nation's decade-old reliability on import for military grade steel, needed for warship building.

When the chips were down for one of India's biggest military projects, defence scientists and Steel Authority of India Limited (Sail) joined hands to create a special steel — DMR 249 — which would henceforth be used in all Indian warship-building projects.

A calculation suggests domestic production of this type of steel saved upwards of Rs 1,000 crore in foreign exchange only in material cost for the INS Vikrant project.

The savings will be substantially more if all other ongoing warship-building projects, where this steel is being used, are taken into consideration.

The Rs 3,261-crore programme to construct the INS Vikrant at Cochin Shipyard was planned with imported steel.

But soon after the steel cutting, the plan ran into rough waters as supply of steel from Russia completely stopped because of commercial disputes.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Sail came to the rescue.

The Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory — a DRDO unit in Hyderabad — undertook the research, which led to the creation of two types of strategic steel.

While high-strength 249A-type steel is being used for IAC and other warships under construction, there is also 249B-type steel, with even higher strength, for the flight deck of the carrier. Sail made several changes in its furnace, rolling mill and heating pistons to produce this high-strength steel and roll it into sheets of thickness varying between 3 and 70 millimetre.

“Every tonne of the domestic steel costs Rs 4 lakh, while the imported steel would cost Rs 8-9 lakh per tonne,” a navy officer associated with the Vikrant project told Deccan Herald.

Since the aircraft carrier needs 26,000 tonnes of steel, the savings may be more than Rs 1,000 crore only on materials. “There are other hidden costs, but more importantly, nobody wants to part ways with such crucial technology,” he said.

At least three major indigenous warship-building projects of the Navy Project-15A (destroyers), Project-17 (frigates) and Project-28 (anti-submarine warfare corvette) have fallen behind schedule, leading to cost escalation. The rise is about 225 per cent for Project-15A, about 260 per cent for Project-17 and about 157 per cent for Project-28.

The main reasons contributing towards cost escalations is delay in supply of warship-building-quality steel by Russia. The high cost of import and delay in delivery forced the defence ministry to opt for self-reliance. “Now all Indian warships will use the DMR 249 steel,” said navy vice-chief R K Dhowan.

Incidentally, the Vikrant programme has recently received another Rs 300 crore from the Defence Ministry, which is keen to complete the project by 2018 so that India can operate two aircraft carriers simultaneously by the turn of the next decade.