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Electric phosphate smelting furnace in a TVA chemical plant (1942) Smelting is a process of applying heat and a chemical reducing agent to an ore to extract a desired base metal product. [1] It is a form of extractive metallurgy that is used to obtain many metals such as iron, copper, silver, tin, lead and zinc.
A bloomery is a type of metallurgical furnace once used widely for smelting iron from its oxides. The bloomery was the earliest form of smelter capable of smelting iron. Bloomeries produce a porous mass of iron and slag called a bloom .
A blast furnace is a type of metallurgical furnace used for smelting to produce industrial metals, generally pig iron, but also others such as lead or copper. Blast refers to the combustion air being supplied above atmospheric pressure .
Water jacket furnaces, when smelting sulphide copper ores, used an oxidation reaction that produces molten copper matte, which must be further treated in a convertor (similar in concept to a Bessemer convertor) or reverberatory furnace to produce copper metal. The product of that conversion process is known as blister copper.
A metallurgical furnace, often simply referred to as a furnace when the context is known, is an industrial furnace used to heat, melt, or otherwise process metals. Furnaces have been a central piece of equipment throughout the history of metallurgy ; processing metals with heat is even its own engineering specialty known as pyrometallurgy .
The smelting of copper, lead and bauxite in non-ferrous smelting, for instance, is designed to remove the iron and silica that often occurs with those ores, and separates them as iron-silicate-based slags. [1] Copper slag, the waste product of smelting copper ores, was studied in an abandoned Penn Mine in California, US.
Earlier processes for this included the finery forge, the puddling furnace, the Bessemer process, and the open hearth furnace. Modern steel mills and direct-reduction iron plants transfer the molten iron to a ladle for immediate use in the steel making furnaces or cast it into pigs on a pig-casting machine for reuse or resale. Modern pig ...
Integrated steel mill in the Netherlands.The two large towers are blast furnaces.. A steel mill or steelworks is an industrial plant for the manufacture of steel.It may be an integrated steel works carrying out all steps of steelmaking from smelting iron ore to rolled product, but may also be a plant where steel semi-finished casting products are made from molten pig iron or from scrap.