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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 .
The initial product of copper smelting was impure "blister" copper, which contained sulfur and oxygen. To remove these impurities, the blister copper was repeatedly melted and solidified, undergoing a cycle of oxidation and reduction. [7] In one of the previous melting stages, lead was added.
The tatara (鑪) is a traditional Japanese furnace used for smelting iron and steel. The word later also came to mean the entire building housing the furnace. The traditional steel in Japan comes from ironsand processed in a special way, called the tatara system. [1] Iron ore was used in the first steel manufacturing in Japan.
Sinter roasting involves heating the fine ores at high temperatures, where simultaneous oxidation and agglomeration of the ores take place. For example, lead sulfide ores are subjected to sinter roasting in a continuous process after froth flotation to convert the fine ores to workable agglomerates for further smelting operations.
Thus, smelting, or refining, is necessary to reduce the compound containing the Ag + cation into metallic Ag and to remove other byproducts to get at pure silver. [1] The process, which uses mercury amalgamation to recover silver from ore, was first used at scale by Bartolomé de Medina in Pachuca , Mexico , in 1554. [ 2 ]
The traditional Japanese furnace, known as a tatara, was a hybrid type of furnace.It incorporated bellows, like the European blast furnace, but was constructed of clay; these furnaces would be destroyed after the first use. [1]
Converting is a type of metallurgical smelting that includes several processes; the most commercially important form is the treatment of molten metal sulfides to produce crude metal and slag, as in the case of copper and nickel converting. A now-uncommon form is batch treatment of pig iron to produce steel by the Bessemer process.
Zinc smelting is the process of converting zinc concentrates (ores that contain zinc) into pure zinc. Zinc smelting has historically been more difficult than the smelting of other metals, e.g. iron , because in contrast, zinc has a low boiling point .