Welcome to the Rise of Steel part II. We previously looked at the early stages of industrialization of iron and steelmaking, between roughly 1200 and 1850. To briefly recap, making steel was an involved, multistep process. Iron would first be smelted from iron ore in a blast furnace, resulting in high-carbon pig iron. This pig iron was then placed in a special furnace (initially a finery furnace, later a puddling furnace) to remove the carbon and other impurities, resulting in wrought iron. Wrought iron bars would then be placed into clay chests next to sources of carbon and heated for a period of several days, allowing the iron to gradually reabsorb carbon, producing “blister steel.” The methods varied in their specifics across time and place, but this was the general process in western Europe.
I read this and I felt like it was about me ! I'm in the process of building my own steel foundry for my iron ore magnitite. I'm heating it was foundry coke and I have to reach a temperature of 3400 degrees and at 3000 degrees it employees making a sonic boom then the temperature rises so fast with in one hour it's 4000 degrees you have to actually shut it down and I'm pouring gun grade hard steel .2000 pounds of the iron ore crushed I should get 1500 pounds of gun grade steel back. It's assume!
One thing that's always confused me about the chemistry here is that all these processes seem to remove all the carbon then add some back (am I misreading things?) It's surprising you can't just... remove some but not all. Is there some phase change necessary here?
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I read this and I felt like it was about me ! I'm in the process of building my own steel foundry for my iron ore magnitite. I'm heating it was foundry coke and I have to reach a temperature of 3400 degrees and at 3000 degrees it employees making a sonic boom then the temperature rises so fast with in one hour it's 4000 degrees you have to actually shut it down and I'm pouring gun grade hard steel .2000 pounds of the iron ore crushed I should get 1500 pounds of gun grade steel back. It's assume!
Great post!
One thing that's always confused me about the chemistry here is that all these processes seem to remove all the carbon then add some back (am I misreading things?) It's surprising you can't just... remove some but not all. Is there some phase change necessary here?
This is an incredible resource. So much I didn't know. Thank you.