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In making crucible steel, the blister steel bars were broken into pieces and melted in small crucibles, each containing 20 kg or so. This produced higher quality metal, but increased the cost. The Bessemer process reduced the time needed to make lower-grade steel to about half an hour while requiring only enough coke needed to melt the pig iron.
Today, electric arc furnaces (EAF) are a common method of reprocessing scrap metal to create new steel. They can also be used for converting pig iron to steel, but they use a lot of electrical energy (about 440 kWh per metric ton), and are thus generally only economical when there is a plentiful supply of cheap electricity. [64]
The basic oxygen steel-making process is as follows: Molten pig iron (sometimes referred to as "hot metal") from a blast furnace is poured into a large refractory-lined container called a ladle . The metal in the ladle is sent directly for basic oxygen steelmaking or to a pretreatment stage where sulfur , silicon , and phosphorus are removed ...
The process also decreased the labor requirements for steel-making. Before it was introduced, steel was far too expensive to make bridges or the framework for buildings and thus wrought iron had been used throughout the Industrial Revolution. After the introduction of the Bessemer process, steel and wrought iron became similarly priced, and ...
They also operate the Edgar Thomson Works, which is the iron- and steel-making unit of the Mon Valley Works, which includes three other related plants. The company operates the Great Lakes Works, [5] and Granite City Works. [6] Cleveland-Cliffs operates every integrated steel mill: in East Chicago, Indiana, Burns Harbor, Indiana, and Cleveland ...
Pig iron, also known as crude iron, is an intermediate good used by the iron industry in the production of steel. It is developed by smelting iron ore in a blast furnace. Pig iron has a high carbon content, typically 3.8–4.7%, [1] along with silica and other dross, which makes it brittle and not useful directly as a material except for ...
Carbon steel is the easiest type of steel to machine. High-carbon steel can be more time consuming to cut or grind, and will wear tools faster. Low-carbon steel can get gummy, making it difficult to work with. Generally, the presence of alloys used to increase mechanical performance often makes machining more difficult.
The properties of steel depend on its microstructure: the arrangement of different phases, some harder, some with greater ductility. At the atomic level, the four phases of auto steel include martensite (the hardest yet most brittle), bainite (less hard), ferrite (more ductile), and austenite (the most ductile). The phases are arranged by ...