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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 Chinese are thought to have skipped the bloomery process completely, starting with the blast furnace and the finery forge to produce wrought iron; by the fifth century BC, metalworkers in the southern state of Wu had invented the blast furnace and the means to both cast iron and to decarburize the carbon-rich pig iron produced in a blast ...
Integrated steel mill in the Netherlands.The two large towers are blast furnaces.. A steel mill or steelworks is an industrial plant for the manufacture of steel.It may be an integrated steel works carrying out all steps of steelmaking from smelting iron ore to rolled product, but may also be a plant where steel semi-finished casting products are made from molten pig iron or from scrap.
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 .
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.
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.
The process starts by charging solid sinter and heated coke into the top of the blast furnace. Preheated air at 190 to 1,050 °C (370 to 1,920 °F) is blown into the bottom of the furnace. Zinc vapour and sulfides leave through the top and enter the condenser. Slag and lead collect at the bottom of the furnace and are tapped off regularly.
Earlier processes for this included the finery forge, the puddling furnace, the Bessemer process, and the open hearth furnace. Modern steel mills and direct-reduction iron plants transfer the molten iron to a ladle for immediate use in the steel making furnaces or cast it into pigs on a pig-casting machine for reuse or resale. Modern pig ...