Posted on 30 Aug 2016
The stainless Steel Marketing Department of POSCO is actively seeking to expand the usage of PossSD, the steel material proprietarily developed by POSCO, by applying it to escape ladders.
The escape ladder refers to a device being installed in the balcony or the floor slab of apartments that allow a person to evacuate by opening up a buried hatch, unfolding the containment ladder, and climbing down to below in the event of a fire or emergency situation. The current Building Act requires apartment buildings to install any one of the following: a shelter space, light-weight party wall between housing units, evacuation exit on a party wall, or a top-down evacuation exit (escape ladder).
Having started out in Busan and Gyeongnam Province, some local governments in Chungnam Province are now also seeking to install the escape ladder. This has led to a new demand for the stainless application, which amounts to around 3,000 tons as of last year, and it is likely to realize annual growth of more than 20%.
Responding to the demand in the market, POSCO has gone through trial production for the PossSD, which the company had developed to replace 304 steel, in collaboration with domestic producers of the escape ladder since early this year, and plans to start mass-producing and supplying it in September after undergoing a fire safety certification test.
Having the similar level of corrosion-resistance and ductility as 304 steel, POSCO's unique steel material, PossSD won the Innovation of the Year Award from the World Steel Association in October of last year. The use of PossSD has improved the stability and durability of the escape ladder developed this time. POSCO plans to further promote the material targeting local governments, domestic construction companies and manufacturers of the escape ladder to expand its sales.
* PossSD: This consists of lean duplex stainless steel with super ductility using a strip-casting process that can directly produce hot-rolled coils in molten steel without a separate process. It has increased cost competitiveness by significantly reducing the content of expensive raw materials such as nickel and molybdenum while sustaining the general STS steel grade's moldability and corrosion resistance. This is registered with the Korean Industrial Standards (KS) as STS329FLD and the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) as S82013. Last October, POSCO was awarded as the Innovation of the Year by the World Steel Association for the development of PossSD.
[Picture] Escape ladder made of the high strength, high corrosion-resistantce stainless steel ``PossSD``
