Development of blast furnace for iron making allows the best production of iron.
This could contribute to our life.
However, the blast furnace and the iron making process causes some trouble.
The emitted gases from whole iron making process from blast furnace and
coke plant and sinter plant are not good at the environment.
These gases are composed of carbon monoxide,
carbon dioxide, and sometimes SOx and NOx and some dust.
If they are emitted to air,
then it could cause air pollution and global warming.
So iron makers and steel makers try to limit the emission of these gases.
The one way is to recycle these gases,
removing dust from this emitted gas,
and reheat this gas,
or this is just used to heat the other raw metals in the plant.
This results in the economic use of this gasses.
And also recycle this gasses ensures that
the stable you drop this gas without purchasing this gas from external source.
It could lower the cost and it could minimize some shortage.
On the other hand, there is new direction for iron making to minimize this kind of gases.
Several types of alternative iron making process have been investigated and developed,
in order not to emit this kind of gases and to compete with available low quality ores.
However, many of them were not so successful yet,
but probably the only commercially successful process is FINEX.
Now, let's compare these two processes.
That's inside, We see the blast furnace,
the conventional iron making process.
We use high quality ores and high quality coal in order to produce sinter and coke.
And they are charged in the blast furnace to form this kind of structure inside.
This is quite successful process,
but it requires good quality raw materials and during coke making and sinter making,
they produce a lot of the pollutions and also blast furnace produces some depleted gases.
On the other hand,
in FINEX process high quality ore is not required.
We may use low quality fine ores and just non-cocking coal is used to produce iron.
So this does not require coke plant and sinter plant,
so it could minimize the pollution and it could also lower
the product cost due to use of low quality low materials.
We may expect the other type of
new iron making process which could be developed in near future.
Once hot metal is produced from iron making plant,
then this is to be tapped into torpedo car and delivered to the steelmaking plant.
The hot metal should be converted into liquid steel.
This will be done in steelmaking plant and this will be discussed in next lesson.
Kim, Nack JoonProfessor
Suh, Dong WooAssociate Professor
Kang, Youn-BaeProfessor
Kim, Sung-JoonProfessor
