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Former AHM blast furnace in Port of Sagunt, Valencia, Spain. 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. [citation needed]
Smelting. 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.
Furnaces of this type include: The blast furnace, used to produce pig iron from iron ore. These can be subdivided into: Cold blast furnaces; Hot blast furnaces; The bloomery, a precursor to the blast furnace that produces sponge iron from ore; The blowing house, a traditional furnace for smelting tin; The smeltmill, a traditional furnace for ...
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 wrought iron. Blast furnaces, which produce pig iron, have largely superseded bloomeries.
The furnace is charged with slag, scrap iron, limestone, coke, oxides, dross, and reverberatory slag. The coke is used to melt and reduce the lead. Limestone reacts with impurities and floats to the top. This process also keeps the lead from oxidizing. The molten lead flows from the blast furnace into holding pots.
Bloomery smelting during the Middle Ages. Ferrous metallurgy is the metallurgy of iron and its alloys. The earliest surviving prehistoric iron artifacts, from the 4th millennium BC in Egypt, [1] were made from meteoritic iron-nickel. [2] It is not known when or where the smelting of iron from ores began, but by the end of the 2nd millennium BC ...
Pig iron. 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 ...
Bessemer process. The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace. The key principle is removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raises the temperature ...