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Steel is an alloy composed of between 0.2 and 2.0 percent carbon, with the balance being iron. From prehistory through the creation of the blast furnace, iron was produced from iron ore as wrought iron, 99.82–100 percent Fe, and the process of making steel involved adding carbon to iron, usually in a serendipitous manner, in the forge, or via the cementation process.
One of the fragments was made of bloomery iron rather than meteoritic iron. [37] [38] The earliest iron artifacts made from bloomeries in China date to end of the 9th century BC. [39] Cast iron was used in ancient China for warfare, agriculture and architecture. [9] Around 500 BC, metalworkers in the southern state of Wu achieved a temperature ...
In 1945, the US produced 67% of the world's pig iron, and 72% of the steel. By comparison, 2014 percentages were 2.4% of the pig iron, and 5.3% of the steel production. Although US iron and steel output continued to grow overall through the 1950s and 1960s, the world steel industry grew much faster, and the US share of world production shrank.
Steel is made from iron and carbon. Cast iron is a hard, brittle material that is difficult to work, whereas steel is malleable, relatively easily formed and versatile. On its own, iron is not strong, but a low concentration of carbon – less than 1 percent, depending on the kind of steel – gives steel strength and other important properties.
Steel (with smaller carbon content than pig iron but more than wrought iron) was first produced in antiquity by using a bloomery. Blacksmiths in Luristan in western Persia were making good steel by 1000 BC. [92] Then improved versions, Wootz steel by India and Damascus steel were developed around 300 BC and AD 500 respectively. These methods ...
Most cast iron was refined and converted to bar iron, with substantial losses. Bar iron was made by the bloomery process, which was the predominant iron smelting process until the late 18th century. In the UK in 1720, there were 20,500 tons of cast iron produced with charcoal and 400 tons with coke.
The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace. The key principle is removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raises the temperature of the iron mass ...
Pig iron, also known as crude iron, is an intermediate good used by the iron industry in the production of steel. It is developed by smelting iron ore in a blast furnace . Pig iron has a high carbon content, typically 3.8–4.7%, [ 1 ] along with silica and other dross , which makes it brittle and not useful directly as a material except for ...