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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 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 .
A water jacket furnace can be used to reduce non-ferrous oxide ores mixed with coke, to produce metal and slag. When smelting lead, the feedstock is lead oxide, coke and fluxes. When smelting lead sulphide ores, the ore is first sintered to form a lead oxide sinter. Lead and silver ores often occur in the same ore body.
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 .
Reverberatory furnaces (in this context, usually called air furnaces) were formerly also used for melting brass, bronze, and pig iron for foundry work. They were also, for the first 75 years of the 20th century, the dominant smelting furnace used in copper production, treating either roasted calcine or raw copper sulfide concentrate. [1]
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 .
The pig iron was melted in a running out furnace and then run out into a trough. This process oxidized the silicon to form a slag, which floated on the iron and was removed by lowering a dam at the end of the trough. The product of this process was a white metal, known as finers metal or refined iron.
Smelting involves thermal reactions in which at least one product is a molten phase. Metal oxides can then be smelted by heating with coke or charcoal (forms of carbon ), a reducing agent that liberates the oxygen as carbon dioxide leaving a refined mineral.