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The properties of iron have made it an invaluable material since it was first exploited in England around 2,700 years ago. The strength, hardness and toughness of the metal made it ideal for a wide range of applications, for example tools, weapons, nails, beams and horseshoes.
Each puddler worked at an individual puddling furnace, manipulating a ball of molten iron under intense heat. When ready, the ball of iron would be beaten using a shingling hammer to remove impurities. Roller – rolling mills were used to flatten and shape iron and steel to make bars, angles and plates. The iron rollers fed iron between ...
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iron processing, use of a smelting process to turn the ore into a form from which products can be fashioned. Included in this article also is a discussion of the mining of iron and of its preparation for smelting.
Iron (Fe) is a relatively dense metal with a silvery white appearance and distinctive magnetic properties. It constitutes 5 percent by weight of the Earth’s crust, and it is the fourth most abundant element after oxygen, silicon, and aluminum. It melts at a temperature of 1,538° C (2,800° F).
Iron is allotropic—that is, it exists in different forms. Its crystal structure is either body-centred cubic (bcc) or face-centred cubic (fcc), depending on the temperature. In both crystallographic modifications, the basic configuration is a cube with iron atoms located at the corners. There is an extra atom in the centre of each cube in the bcc modification and in the centre of each face in the fcc. At room temperature, pure iron has a bcc structure referred to as alpha-ferrite; this persists until the temperature is raised to 912° C (1,674° F), when it transforms into an fcc arrangement known as austenite. With further heating, austenite remains until the temperature reaches 1,394° C (2,541° F), at which point the bcc structure reappears. This form of iron, called delta-ferrite, remains until the melting point is reached.
The pure metal is malleable and can be easily shaped by hammering, but apart from specialized electrical applications it is rarely used without adding other elements to improve its properties. Mostly it appears in iron-carbon alloys such as steels, which contain between 0.003 and about 2 percent carbon (the majority lying in the range of 0.01 to 1.2 percent), and cast irons with 2 to 4 percent carbon. At the carbon contents typical of steels, iron carbide (Fe3C), also known as cementite, is formed; this leads to the formation of pearlite, which in a microscope can be seen to consist of alternate laths of alpha-ferrite and cementite. Cementite is harder and stronger than ferrite but is much less malleable, so that vastly differing mechanical properties are obtained by varying the amount of carbon. At the higher carbon contents typical of cast irons, carbon may separate out as either cementite or graphite, depending on the manufacturing conditions. Again, a wide range of properties is obtained. This versatility of iron-carbon alloys leads to their widespread use in engineering and explains why iron is by far the most important of all the industrial metals.
There is evidence that meteorites were used as a source of iron before 3000 bc, but extraction of the metal from ores dates from about 2000 bc. Production seems to have started in the copper-producing regions of Anatolia and Persia, where the use of iron compounds as fluxes to assist in melting may have accidentally caused metallic iron to accumulate on the bottoms of copper smelting furnaces. When iron making was properly established, two types of furnace came into use. Bowl furnaces were constructed by digging a small hole in the ground and arranging for air from a bellows to be introduced through a pipe or tuyere. Stone-built shaft furnaces, on the other hand, relied on natural draft, although they too sometimes used tuyeres. In both cases, smelting involved creating a bed of red-hot charcoal to which iron ore mixed with more charcoal was added. Chemical reduction of the ore then occurred, but, since primitive furnaces were incapable of reaching temperatures higher than 1,150° C (2,100° F), the normal product was a solid lump of metal known as a bloom. This may have weighed up to 5 kilograms (11 pounds) and consisted of almost pure iron with some entrapped slag and pieces of charcoal. The manufacture of iron artifacts then required a shaping operation, which involved heating blooms in a fire and hammering the red-hot metal to produce the desired objects. Iron made in this way is known as wrought iron. Sometimes too much charcoal seems to have been used, and iron-carbon alloys, which have lower melting points and can be cast into simple shapes, were made unintentionally. The applications of this cast iron were limited because of its brittleness, and in the early Iron Age only the Chinese seem to have exploited it. Elsewhere, wrought iron was the preferred material.
Although the Romans built furnaces with a pit into which slag could be run off, little change in iron-making methods occurred until medieval times. By the 15th century, many bloomeries used low shaft furnaces with water power to drive the bellows, and the bloom, which might weigh over 100 kilograms, was extracted through the top of the shaft. The final version of this kind of bloomery hearth was the Catalan forge, which survived in Spain until the 19th century. Another design, the high bloomery furnace, had a taller shaft and evolved into the 3-metre- (10-foot-) high Stückofen, which produced blooms so large they had to be removed through a front opening in the furnace.
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The blast furnace appeared in Europe in the 15th century when it was realized that cast iron could be used to make one-piece guns with good pressure-retaining properties, but whether its introduction was due to Chinese influence or was an independent development is unknown. At first, the differences between a blast furnace and a Stückofen were slight. Both had square cross sections, and the main changes required for blast-furnace operation were an increase in the ratio of charcoal to ore in the charge and a taphole for the removal of liquid iron. The product of the blast furnace became known as pig iron from the method of casting, which involved running the liquid into a main channel connected at right angles to a number of shorter channels. The whole arrangement resembled a sow suckling her litter, and so the lengths of solid iron from the shorter channels were known as pigs.
Despite the military demand for cast iron, most civil applications required malleable iron, which until then had been made directly in a bloomery. The arrival of blast furnaces, however, opened up an alternative manufacturing route; this involved converting cast iron to wrought iron by a process known as fining. Pieces of cast iron were placed on a finery hearth, on which charcoal was being burned with a plentiful supply of air, so that carbon in the iron was removed by oxidation, leaving semisolid malleable iron behind. From the 15th century on, this two-stage process gradually replaced direct iron making, which nevertheless survived into the 19th century.
Mar 22, 2023 · The production of steel during the British Industrial Revolution became cheaper and more reliable thanks to the Bessemer converter, a type of blast furnace that removed undesirable impurities from pig iron.
- Mark Cartwright
- The steel industry was important in the Industrial Revolution because the metal was more flexible and stronger than iron and so useful for large en...
- The steel process invented by Henry Bessemer was important to the Industrial Revolution because it had previously been very expensive to make steel...
- Steel is stronger, lighter, and more malleable than iron.
Up to 1709, furnaces could only use charcoal to produce iron. However, wood (which is what charcoal is made from) was becoming more expensive, as forests were being cleared for farmland and...
Mar 7, 2018 · In the 18 th and 19 th centuries, iron furnaces were a powerful contribution to the American economy and the transition from a pioneer lifestyle into a more modern one. If you have ever passed by an old iron furnace and wondered how old it was, how it worked, and how it shaped history—keep reading!
A metallurgical furnace, often simply referred to as a furnace when the context is known, is an industrial furnace used to heat, melt, or otherwise process metals. Furnaces have been a central piece of equipment throughout the history of metallurgy; processing metals with heat is even its own engineering specialty known as pyrometallurgy.
