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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.
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 ...
This used a blast furnace to make pig iron, which then had to undergo a further process to make forgeable bar iron. Processes for the second stage include fining in a finery forge. In the 13th century during the High Middle Ages the blast furnace was introduced by China who had been using it since as early as 200 b.c during the Qin dynasty.
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 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 ]
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.
Direct reduction processes can be divided roughly into two categories: gas-based and coal-based. In both cases, the objective of the process is to remove the oxygen contained in various forms of iron ore (sized ore, concentrates, pellets, mill scale, furnace dust, etc.) in order to convert the ore to metallic iron, without melting it (below 1,200 °C (2,190 °F)).
The PCI method is based on the simple concept of primary air (termed the "conveying gas") carrying pulverized coal which injected through a lance to the tuyere (mid-bottom inlet of a blast furnace), then mixed with secondary hot air (termed the "blast") supplied through a blowpipe in the tuyere and then piped to a furnace to create a balloon ...