Ad
related to: how to make steel
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
In making crucible steel, the blister steel bars were broken into pieces and melted in small crucibles, each containing 20 kg or so. This produced higher quality metal, but increased the cost. The Bessemer process reduced the time needed to make lower-grade steel to about half an hour while requiring only enough coke needed to melt the pig iron.
Before it was introduced, steel was far too expensive to make bridges or the framework for buildings and thus wrought iron had been used throughout the Industrial Revolution. After the introduction of the Bessemer process, steel and wrought iron became similarly priced, and some users, primarily railroads, turned to steel.
Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon with improved strength and fracture resistance compared to other forms of iron. Because of its high tensile strength and low cost, steel is one of the most commonly manufactured materials in the world.
The steel is further refined in the ladle furnace, by adding alloying materials to impart special properties required by the customer. Sometimes argon or nitrogen is bubbled into the ladle to make the alloys mix correctly. After the steel is poured off from the BOS vessel, the slag is poured into the slag pots through the BOS vessel mouth and ...
Iron alloys are most broadly divided by their carbon content: cast iron has 2–4% carbon impurities; wrought iron oxidizes away most of its carbon, to less than 0.1%. The much more valuable steel has a delicately intermediate carbon fraction, and its material properties range according to the carbon percentage: high carbon steel is stronger but more brittle than low carbon steel.
Iron ore is the raw material used to make pig iron, which is one of the main raw materials to make steel — 98% of the mined iron ore is used to make steel. [2] In 2011 the Financial Times quoted Christopher LaFemina, mining analyst at Barclays Capital, saying that iron ore is "more integral to the global economy than any other commodity ...
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865–1925 (1995) Chapter 1 "The Dominance of Rails" Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie (The Penguin Press, 2006). Paskoff, Paul F. Iron and Steel in the Nineteenth Century (Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography) (1989) 385 pp; biographies and brief corporate histories; Rogers ...