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Steel mill with two arc furnaces. Steelmaking is the process of producing steel from iron ore and/or scrap.Steel has been made for millennia, and was commercialized on a massive scale in the 1850s and 1860s, using the Bessemer and Siemens-Martin processes.
William Kelly, Inventor. William Kelly (August 21, 1811 – February 11, 1888), born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was an American inventor.He is credited with being one of the inventors of modern steel production, through the process of injecting air into molten iron, which he experimented with in the early 1850s.
This made steel easier, quicker and cheaper to manufacture, and revolutionised structural engineering. One of the most significant inventors of the Second Industrial Revolution, Bessemer also made at least 128 other inventions in the fields of iron, steel and glass. Unlike many inventors, he managed to bring his own projects to fruition and ...
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.
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.
At the time, there was another laboratory-scale process of adding potassium nitrate to cast iron to produce oxygen and burn off the carbon, thereby producing steel. Heaton formalized a process using sodium nitrate (instead of potassium) and designed equipment that made the commingling of the nitrate and the liquid cast iron reliable and ...
Most of the steel produced has been by the growing number of mini-mills, also called specialty mills, which in 2014 numbered 113. In 1981, mini-mills produced an estimated 15% of US steel. [13] Since 2002, steel produced by electric arc furnace, the process used by the mini-mills, has produced more than half the steel made in the US.
In the late 1840s, the German chemist Franz Anton Lohage developed a modification of the puddling process to produce not iron but steel at the Haspe Iron Works in Hagen; it was subsequently commercialized in Germany, France and the UK in the 1850s, and puddled steel was the main raw material for Krupp cast steel even in the 1870s. [18]