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Blast furnaces differ from bloomeries and reverberatory furnaces in that in a blast furnace, flue gas is in direct contact with the ore and iron, allowing carbon monoxide to diffuse into the ore and reduce the iron oxide. The blast furnace operates as a countercurrent exchange process whereas a bloomery does not.
The Boudouard reaction is an important process inside a blast furnace. The reduction of iron oxides is not achieved by carbon directly, as reactions between solids are typically very slow, but by carbon monoxide. The resulting carbon dioxide undergoes a (reverse) Boudouard reaction upon contact with coke carbon.
For blast furnaces, direct reduction corresponds to the reduction of oxides by the carbon in the coke. However, in practice, direct reduction only plays a significant role in the final stage of iron reduction in a blast furnace, by helping to reduce wustite (FeO) to iron. In this case, the chemical reaction can be trivially described as follows ...
The coking plant that feeds a battery of blast furnaces is just as expensive as the blast furnace and requires a specific quality of coal. [ 64 ] [ 65 ] Conversely, many direct-reduction processes are disadvantaged by the costly transformation of ore into pellets: these cost on average 70% more than raw ore. [ 66 ]
The efficiency of the blast furnace was improved by the change to hot blast, patented by James Beaumont Neilson in Scotland in 1828. [90] This further reduced production costs. Within a few decades, the practice was to have a 'stove' as large as the furnace next to it into which the waste gas (containing CO) from the furnace was directed and burnt.
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 .
The blast furnace is similar in structure to a cupola furnace used in iron foundries. 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 ...
Blast furnace gas (BFG) [1] is a by-product of blast furnaces that is generated when the iron ore is reduced with coke to metallic iron. It has a very low heating value , about 3.5 MJ/m 3 (93 BTU /cu.ft), [ 2 ] because it consists of about 51 vol% nitrogen and 22 vol% carbon dioxide , which are not flammable.