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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.
Graph of US iron and steel production, 1900–2014, data from USGS. The technological development of the US iron and steel industry has closely mirrored that of other countries. In the 1800s, the US switched from charcoal to coal in ore smelting, adopted the Bessemer process, and saw the rise of very large integrated steel mills.
Iron meteorites consist overwhelmingly of nickel-iron alloys. The metal taken from these meteorites is known as meteoric iron and was one of the earliest sources of usable iron available to humans. Iron was extracted from iron–nickel alloys, which comprise about 6% of all meteorites that fall on the Earth.
Iron ore, coke, and flux are fed into the blast furnace and heated. The coke reduces the iron oxide in the ore to metallic iron, and the molten mass separates into slag and iron. Some of the iron from the blast furnace is cooled, and marketed as pig iron; the rest flows into basic oxygen furnaces, where it is converted into steel.
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.
Although steel is an alloy of iron and a small amount of carbon, historically steel and iron-making were intended for different products given the high costs of steel over wrought iron. The main difficulty with making steel is that its higher melting point than pig or cast iron was not easily achievable in large-scale production until methods ...
The Iron Rolling Mill (Eisenwalzwerk), 1870s, by Adolph Menzel. Casting at an iron foundry: From Fra Burmeister og Wain's Iron Foundry, 1885 by Peder Severin Krøyer. An ironworks or iron works is an industrial plant where iron is smelted and where heavy iron and steel products are made.
The iron compounds produced on the largest scale in industry are iron(II) sulfate (FeSO 4 ·7H 2 O) and iron(III) chloride (FeCl 3). The former is one of the most readily available sources of iron(II), but is less stable to aerial oxidation than Mohr's salt ((NH 4) 2 Fe(SO 4) 2 ·6H 2 O). Iron(II) compounds tend to be oxidized to iron(III ...