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Steel March 10, 2011

Posted by Searchable Content in Content, EN, Metals, The Chemistry of Making.
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And that is served? No, the program today is not about cooking but about a material part of most kitchens, steel.

It’s just you look around you’ll realize that thanks to the steel can make food, reheat it in the stove, keeping it in the refrigerator or defrost it in the microwave.

But not only in the kitchen we found the steel.

He is present in our lives of many different forms.

Our journey to understand how steel is produced, began in the previous program.

So let us recall briefly what is learned.

In the last episode we learned that the steel is not found in nature, it is an alloy of iron and carbon, produced artificially by man.

It works like this: Iron ore is extracted from deposits, …

goes to a steel mill, where it is placed in a special oven called a blast furnace along with other raw materials, coke and limestone.

In the blast furnace under very high temperatures, the oxygen present in the ore is extracted, forming a preferential reduction process.

The limestone, in turn, serves to reduce the melting point of undesirable compounds that will form the slag.

The resulting product of reactions occurring in the blast furnace is pig iron.

Composed of iron and carbon, iron is the raw material of steel.

But you know what is pig iron?

Pig iron is the immediate product of reduction of iron ore in blast furnaces.

With a carbon content of around 5% and some trace elements such as silicon, manganese, phosphorus and sulfur, iron, when solid, is a brittle material and no major practical applications.

We have just seen the production of pig iron in blast furnace happens.

However, this is only an intermediate step in obtaining the final product.

Lack also know a little more about the steelworks, the area responsible for processing of pig iron into steel.

Depending on the steel mill, there are two types of steelworks. Integrated mills – which produce steel from iron ore – the furnace refines pig iron produced by the plant in the blast furnace.

Already in the semi-integrated plants – which produce no pig – get the furnace steel from recycled scrap.

Here in this integrated steel mill, is carried out both the production of pig iron from raw materials in blast furnace, as the transformation of the pig iron into steel, the steel works.

Let us know a little more?

This is the case of stainless steel, for example, that besides iron and carbon also contains chromium and nickel.

These components allow the most stainless steel does not rust and can be used in the manufacture of surgical supplies, for example.

The continuous casting. Here, the liquid steel produced in the furnace is turned into solid bars called ingots.

Though this is a finished product, steel billets can also be reworked in the form of slides, tubes and wires, according to its various applications.

Steel blades, for example, are used in the auto industry to make doors, hoods and bodies of cars.

As before, there are two ways to produce steel.

The first is from iron, obtained from reduction of iron ore in blast furnace.

But we also saw that you can make steel from recycled scrap, in semi-integrated plants like this one.

Let us know a little more?

One of the important characteristics of steel is that it can be recycled indefinitely without loss in quantity or quality.

Recycling is as old as history itself of its use.

Currently, the collection of scrap metal to feed the steel mills is a business that generates jobs and income in large cities.

Moreover, the recycling of steel has a strong ecological impact by spending less energy than its initial creation.

Either from the iron ore or scrap recycling, have you seen get the big work that gives this steel in cars, buildings, machinery and tools such as pan?

Yeah, steel is a key product in our day to day and now you know how it’s done.

Wise up and see you soon.

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