|
Steelmaking is the process for producing steel from iron ore and scrap. In steelmaking, impurities such as nitrogen, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur and excess carbon are removed from the raw iron, and alloying elements such as manganese, nickel, chromium and vanadium are added to produce different grades of steel. Limiting dissolved gases such as nitrogen and oxygen, and entrained impurities (termed "inclusions") in the steel is also important to ensure the quality of the products cast from the liquid steel.〔B. Deo and R. Boom, Fundamentals of Steelmaking Metallurgy, Prentice and Hall, 1993〕 Steelmaking has existed for millennia, but it was not commercialized until the 19th century. The ancient craft process of steelmaking was the crucible process. In the 1850s and 1860s, the Bessemer process and the Siemens-Martin process turned steelmaking into a heavy industry. Today there are two major commercial processes for making steel, namely basic oxygen steelmaking, which has liquid pig-iron from the blast furnace and scrap steel as the main feed materials, and electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking, which uses scrap steel or direct reduced iron (DRI) as the main feed materials. Oxygen steelmaking is fuelled predominantly by the exothermic nature of the reactions inside the vessel where as in EAF steelmaking, electrical energy is used to melt the solid scrap and/or DRI materials. In recent times, EAF steelmaking technology has evolved closer to oxygen steelmaking as more chemical energy is introduced into the process.〔E.T. Turkdoagn, Fundamentals of Steelmaking, IOM, 1996〕 ==History== Steelmaking has played a crucial role in the development of modern technological societies. Cast iron is a hard brittle material that is difficult to work, whereas steel is malleable, relatively easily formed and a versatile material. For much of human history, steel has only been made in small quantities. Since the invention of the Bessemer process in the 19th century and subsequent technological developments in injection technology and process control, mass production of steel has become an integral part of the world's economy and a key indicator of technological development.〔S. Sass, The Substance of Civilization, Arcade Publishing, 1998〕 The earliest means of producing steel was in a bloomery. Early modern methods of producing steel were often labour-intensive and highly skilled arts. See: *finery forge, in which the German finery process could be managed to produce steel. *blister steel and crucible steel. An important aspect of the Industrial Revolution was the development of large-scale methods of producing forgeable metal (bar iron or steel). The puddling furnace was initially a means of producing wrought iron, but was later applied to steel production. The real revolution in steelmaking only began at the end of the 1850s when the Bessemer process became the first successful method of steelmaking in quantity, followed by the open-hearth furnace. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Steelmaking」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|