China National Gold Award Awarded to Daye Special Steel for Its Wind Turbine Bearing Steel

At the 29th National Invention Exhibition and the Belt and Road Initiative & BRICS Skills Innovation Competition, which recently concluded in Shijiazhuang, Daye Special Steel Co., Ltd. won the gold medal for its project "Research and Industrialization of Key Technologies for High-End Special Steel for High-Power Wind Turbine Main Shaft Bearings," marking a crucial step forward in my country's self-sufficiency in high-end bearing materials.

As the cornerstone of the equipment manufacturing industry, bearing steel is known as the "king of steels," and its purity, uniformity, and stability directly determine the lifespan and reliability of large-scale equipment. Especially in the wind power sector, with the rapid development of turbines towards higher power and larger capacity, the loads and operating conditions on main shaft bearings are becoming increasingly stringent, placing extremely high demands on material performance. In the past, this type of high-end steel relied heavily on imports, becoming a bottleneck restricting the self-sufficiency and controllability of my country's wind power industry chain.

Facing this challenge, Daye Special Steel focused on the material goal of "ultra-pure and ultra-homogeneous" materials, and carried out systematic technical research to address the problem of uniform microstructure in large-size steel ingots and bars. The company has independently developed and integrated several innovative processes, including core technologies such as low-oxygen smelting in electric furnaces, precise slag removal after the furnace, large-scale deformation control, and digital simulation ingot mold design. Simultaneously, it has developed a patented technology for forming large-scale irregular-shaped ring parts, successfully achieving a breakthrough in the entire process from material smelting to key component manufacturing.

Currently, Daye Special Steel has achieved stable mass production of special steel for multi-megawatt-level wind turbine main bearings and has taken the lead in China in completing the R&D and supply of steel for 25MW ultra-high-power wind turbine main shaft bearings, filling a domestic gap and completely breaking the long-term monopoly of foreign companies in the field of high-end wind turbine bearing materials.

"This is not a victory for a single material, but a manifestation of the coordinated upgrading of China's high-end equipment industry chain," said Liu Wenxue, Party Secretary and General Manager of Daye Special Steel. He added that in the future, the company will continue to deepen cooperation with research institutes, focusing on national strategic areas such as large aircraft, high-speed railways, deep-sea equipment, and polar engineering, continuously tackling core basic material technologies to provide solid support for "Made in China" to move towards high-end and self-sufficiency.