how iron and steel work

The more advanced method of ironmaking is to make iron in the furnace.
Iron ore, charcoal or Coke in blast furnace (
Coke is charcoal made of coal)and limestone (CaCO3Âxad).
A large amount of air exploded at the bottom of the furnace, and calcium in limestone combined with silica to form slag.
Liquid iron is gathered at the bottom of the blast furnace under a layer of slag.
The blacksmith regularly let the iron liquid flow out and cool.
At this point, liquid iron usually flows through a passage into a sand bed.
Once the metal is cooled, it is called cast iron.
To make a ton of cast iron, start with 2 tons (1. 8 metric tons)
1 ton of ore and coke (0. 9 metric tons)
Half a ton (0. 45 metric tons)of limestone.
5 tons of fire consumption (4. 5 metric tons)of air.
The temperature of the blast furnace core reaches nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (
About 1,600 degrees Celsius).
Cast iron contains 4 to 5% carbon and is hard and brittle and almost useless.
You have three options if you want to do anything with it.
First, you can melt it, mix it with the slag, hammer it out to eliminate most of the carbon (down to 0. 3 percent)
Make rugged forged cast iron.
The second option is to melt the cast iron, combine it with the scrap iron, melt the impurities, and add the alloy to form the cast iron.
The metal contains 2 to 4% of carbon and a large amount of silicon, manganese and trace impurities.
As the name suggests, cast iron is usually cast into molds to form a wide variety of parts and products.
The third optimization of cast iron is to further push the refining process and make steel, which we will look at on the next page.