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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.
Iron smelting—the extraction of usable metal from oxidized iron ores—is more difficult than tin and copper smelting. While these metals and their alloys can be cold-worked or melted in relatively simple furnaces (such as the kilns used for pottery ) and cast into molds, smelted iron requires hot-working and can be melted only in specially ...
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. The mix of slag and iron in the bloom, termed sponge iron, is usually consolidated and further forged into ...
Blast furnaces are currently rarely used in copper smelting, but modern lead smelting blast furnaces are much shorter than iron blast furnaces and are rectangular in shape. [76] Modern lead blast furnaces are constructed using water-cooled steel or copper jackets for the walls, and have no refractory linings in the side walls. [ 77 ]
Steel mill with two arc furnaces. Steelmaking is the process of producing steel from iron ore and/or scrap.Steel has been made for millennia, and was commercialized on a massive scale in the 1850s and 1860s, using the Bessemer and Siemens-Martin processes.
Henry Cort's original puddling process only worked where the raw material was white cast iron, rather than the grey pig iron that was the usual raw material for finery forges. To use grey pig iron, a preliminary refining process was necessary to remove silicon. The pig iron was melted in a running out furnace and then run out into a trough ...
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The Manufacture of Iron -- Filling the Furnace, an 1873 wood engraving. Many furnace designs for smelting combine ore, fuel, and other reagents like flux in a single chamber. Mechanisms, such as bellows or motorized fans, then drive pressurized blasts of air into the chamber. These blasts make the fuel burn hotter and drive chemical reactions.