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The puddling furnace is a metalmaking technology used to create wrought iron or steel from the pig iron produced in a blast furnace. The furnace is constructed to pull the hot air over the iron without the fuel coming into direct contact with the iron, a system generally known as a reverberatory furnace or open hearth furnace. The major ...
Cast iron development lagged in Europe because wrought iron was the desired product and the intermediate step of producing cast iron involved an expensive blast furnace and further refining of pig iron to cast iron, which then required a labor and capital intensive conversion to wrought iron.
The concept of dividing pre-historical ages into systems based on metals extends far back in European history, probably originated by Lucretius in the first century BC. But the present archaeological system of the three main ages – stone, bronze and iron – originates with the 19th century Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, who placed the system on a more scientific basis by ...
Below 912 °C (1,674 °F), iron has a body-centered cubic (bcc) crystal structure and is known as α-iron or ferrite. It is thermodynamically stable and a fairly soft metal. α-Fe can be subjected to pressures up to ca. 15 GPa before transforming into a high-pressure form termed ε-Fe discussed below.
Telluric iron, which is an iron-nickel alloy very similar to meteorites, also displays very coarse Widmanstätten structures. Telluric iron is metallic iron, rather than an ore (in which iron is usually found), and it originated from the Earth rather than from space. Telluric iron is an extremely rare metal, found only in a few places in the world.
In steel metallurgy, nickel is alloyed with iron since 1888 (date of Schneider et Cie's patent [5] on nickel steel based on Jean Werth's research [6]) to produce maraging steel and some low-alloy steels. Other technological uses include Invar and Mu-metal.
In the modern world, iron alloys, such as steel, stainless steel, cast iron and special steels, are by far the most common industrial metals, due to their mechanical properties and low cost. The iron and steel industry is thus very important economically, and iron is the cheapest metal, with a price of a few dollars per kilogram or pound.
Rapid cooling prevents the formation of cementite structure, instead forcibly dissolving carbon atoms in the ferrite lattice. [1] In steel alloyed with metals such as nickel and manganese, the eutectoid temperature becomes much lower, but the kinetic barriers to phase transformation remain the same. This allows quenching to start at a lower ...