How To Make Steel From Iron

How nosotros make steel

Our steelmaking process.

The steelmaking process is managed and developed by our teams of experts; they're passionate well-nigh what they practice and make every effort to meet customer needs and anticipate future requirements. It'due south a challenging and demanding process, and we're proud to exist part of this exciting industry.

The 2,000-acre site at Scunthorpe is an integrated site – this means the raw materials for steel manufacture are transported to the site, where they are ultimately converted to steel.

The starting point – refining the raw materials

Loftier-quality coke is made at our Coke Ovens – coal, sourced from all over the world, is charged into the top of each oven and heated at around 1,100°C for 18 hours. This carbonisation process removes impurities, like coal tar and coal gas, to produce coke. The red-hot coke is pushed from the side of each oven and quenched with water before being transferred by conveyor to the blast furnaces.

Boosted raw materials are processed at Scunthorpe's sinter establish, which forms an iron-rich feedstock for the blast furnaces. The ingredients – iron ore, coke and limestone fines – are carefully stacked and blended, and then passed nether an ignition hood at the sinter plant. This heating process is carefully controlled to make sure the resulting sinter has the right composition and optimum sizes for the side by side stage of the process at the blast furnaces.

Making iron

In Scunthorpe we have four blast furnaces named later on iv English queens – Mary, Bess, Anne and Victoria. Coke, iron ore, sinter and limestone are fed – or charged – into the peak of the furnaces. A hot air smash of temperatures around ane,000°C is injected at the bottom of the furnace through nozzles called tuyeres. Every bit the coke burns, temperatures higher than 2,000°C are reached and this heat creates molten metal (iron). The molten metal collects at the bottom of the furnace and the limestone combines with impurities to form slag. Because this slag is less dense than molten metal, it floats on top of the metal and tin can be removed – it then goes on to be used in the cement and road building industries.

The molten metal is 'tapped' from the lesser of the furnace into torpedoes, each 1 able to acquit 300 tonnes of liquid iron, and moved by rail to the steel plant for conversion to steel.

Making steel

At Scunthorpe, nosotros employ the Basic Oxygen Steelmaking (BOS) procedure – our modern convertors (or vessels) take a combined accuse of scrap and liquid iron of upwardly to 330 tonnes and convert this into steel in merely 25 minutes.

When the liquid atomic number 26 arrives at the BOS Plant, information technology's poured from the torpedoes into refractory-lined charging ladles where unwanted elements like sulphur are removed. Scrap metal is charged into one of our steelmaking vessels (or convertors) and the liquid iron is then added to the vessel. Using a h2o-cooled lance, loftier purity oxygen is blown at twice the speed of sound onto the surface of the liquid iron at very high pressure. Lime is added to the process, which forms a slag and removes the unwanted elements from the liquid steel.

When the oxygen blowing process is complete, the steel is poured – or tapped – into ladles where the desired steel chemistry is accomplished through careful addition of alloying elements and shut control of the deoxidation process, ensuring a very loftier level of steel cleanness.

Farther refinements needed by the customer tin can exist achieved through the secondary steelmaking processes, such equally our ladle arc furnace and vacuum degasser facilities, which control the steel temperatures and chemistries extremely tightly, making sure our huge range of steel grades run across the most enervating customer requirements.

Continuous casting (Concast)

Continuous casting is 1 of the all-time routes for achieving the highest levels of internal and surface quality.

Using an overhead crane, a ladle of liquid steel is transferred from the BOS Plant to the casters, where it is poured – or teemed – into the casting motorcar and shaped by water-cooled copper moulds of varying sizes depending on the terminal product to be made (range 140mm sq up to 1,970 ten 305mm).

The steel is drawn vertically from the bottom of the mould through a curved arrangement of rolls and is cooled with water sprays as the steel passes through the casting machine. The resulting solidified slabs and blooms are straightened as the steel exits the bottom of the caster and are cut to the required lengths for onward processing at our mills.