VA Technologie

Voest-Alpine Industrieanlagenbau Gmbh & Co. (VAI) was an engineering, equipment and construction company based in Linz, Austria and had its American headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company began as a unit of VÖEST (later Voest-Alpine) in 1956 and was taken over by Siemens AG in 2005; the unit is now Siemens VAI Metals Technologies GmbH.

VAI, whose parent company was VA Technologie AG, began as the plant building operation of Vereinigte Österreichische Eisen und Stahlwerke (VÖEST) but became a separate operation in 1956.

The history of VAI is closely linked to the first construction of industrial plants. The English company Brassert & Co began to build the metallurgical plant in Linz in 1938. After the beginning of World War II in 1939, the metallurgical division of Reichswerke Hermann Göring continued with the construction, only to pass it on to the German Mining and Metallurgical association (DBHG) after a short time. The large-scale plant, which was originally planned for metallurgical purposes, was then modified for the arms industry.

After the air raids of the allied forces in July 1944, the entire facilities were severely damaged. By the end of the war, production had basically stopped. In July 1945, the "Alpine Montan AG Hermann Göring" plant was renamed to "Vereinigte Österreichische Eisen- und Stahlwerke" (VÖEST) (United Iron and Steel Plants). For the plant’s reconstruction, some divisions were combined into the so-called “New Building Division”, designed to reconstruct the metallurgical plant in Linz. Thus, the most important metallurgical facilities could all be started up again by the year 1949: the coking plant, blast furnaces, SM-steel making plants (plant with Siemens-Martin-furnace, named after inventors) and heavy plate mills (mills producing plates of over 3 mm thickness). Many of the products were scarce commodities after the war. For this reason, the metallurgical plant was able to recover pretty soon, investing largely into the expansion of its own facilities. Due to the shortage of steel scrap, necessary for the operation of SM blast furnaces, the yearly steel mill capacities of 220,000 tons soon proved to be insufficient. The solution was a new manufacturing process: the LD-process (Linz-Donawitz-process, also called oxygen steelmaking) manufactured in house and commissioned in 1952 in Linz, and 1953 in Donawitz. The huge advantages of this process were cost-saving on the one hand (investment costs were only 65% and operation costs only 55% compared to the SM blast furnace), and larger production capacities on the other.

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