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Jewish World Review How iron and steel work By Marshall Brain http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (MCT) Steel shows up in a huge array of modern products. Cars, tractors, bridges, trains (and their rails), tools, skyscrapers, guns, ships - even the common steel can - all depend on steel. Steel is popular because it is strong and relatively inexpensive. It was also possible for primitive people to create iron and steel fairly easily. Centuries before science would deliver things like aluminum and carbon fiber, just about any society that could make a hot fire was able to discover iron. Have you ever wondered how people refine iron and steel? You probably have heard of iron ore, but how is it that you extract a metal from a rock? Let's take a look. Iron is plentiful - 5 percent of the Earth's crust is iron. In some areas iron concentrates in ores that contain as much as 70 percent iron. One thing that gave certain countries an edge between the 15th and 20th centuries was the availability of big iron ore deposits. For example, England, the United States, France, Germany, Spain and Russia all have good iron ore deposits. When you think of the historical importance of all of these countries, you can see the correlation. Hematite is a common iron ore. It contains oxygen bonded to the iron and usually some silica rock. The goal of iron refining is to turn an ore like hematite into pure iron. The most primitive facility used to refine iron from iron ore is called a bloomery. In a bloomery, you burn charcoal with iron ore and a good supply of oxygen (provided by a bellows or blower). Charcoal is essentially pure carbon. The carbon combines with the oxygen in the iron ore and carries it away, leaving iron metal. In a bloomery, the fire does not get hot enough to melt the iron completely, so you are left with a spongy mass containing iron and silicates from the ore (the bloom). By heating and hammering the bloom, the glassy silicates mix into the iron metal to create wrought iron. Wrought iron is tough and easy to work, making it perfect for a blacksmith shop. The more advanced way to smelt iron is in a blast furnace. You load a blast furnace with iron ore, charcoal or coke (coke is charcoal made from coal) and limestone. Huge quantities of air blast in at the bottom of the furnace. The calcium in the limestone combines with the silicates to form slag. At the bottom of the blast furnace, liquid iron collects along with a layer of slag on top. The liquid iron typically flows into a channel and indentations in a bed of sand. Once it cools, this metal is known as pig iron. To create a ton of pig iron, you start with 2 tons of ore, 1 ton of coke and a half-ton of limestone. The fire consumes 5 tons of air. The temperature reaches almost 3,000 degrees F (about 1,600 degrees C) at the core of the blast furnace. Pig iron contains 4 percent to 5 percent carbon and is so hard and brittle that it is almost useless. Pig iron is useful, however, as the raw material for steel. Steel is iron that has most of the impurities removed. Steel also has a consistent concentration of carbon throughout (0.5 percent to 1.5 percent). Impurities like silica, phosphorous and sulfur weaken steel tremendously, so they are eliminated. The advantage of steel over iron is greatly improved strength. The open hearth furnace is one way to create steel from pig iron. The pig iron, limestone and iron ore go into an open hearth furnace. It is heated to about 1,600 degrees F (870 degrees C). The limestone and ore form a slag that floats on the surface. Impurities, including carbon, are oxidized and float out of the iron into the slag. When the carbon content is right, you have carbon steel. Today most modern steel plants use what's called a basic oxygen furnace to create steel. The advantage is that it is a rapid process - about 10 times faster than the open hearth furnace. A variety of metals might be alloyed with the steel at this point to create different properties. For example, the addition of 10 percent to 30 percent chromium creates stainless steel, which is very resistant to rust. The addition of chromium and molybdenum creates chrome-moly steel, which is strong and light. When you think about it, there are two accidents of nature that have made it much easier for humans to move forward at a rapid pace. One is the huge availability of something as useful as iron ore. The second is the availability of vast quantities of oil and coal to power the production of iron. This is a very lucky coincidence, because without iron and energy, we would not have gotten nearly as far as we have today. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment by clicking here. Previously: How aspirin works How igloos work How the Predator UAV works How retention ponds work How water absorbers work How melamine works How digital music works How coal mining works How an economic depression works How the liver works How 3D movies work How oil pipelines work How jet packs work How seismographs work How Olympic technology works How Personal Rapid Transit works How 3G works How the Global Position System (GPS) works How octane works How cruise missiles work How submarines work How miles work How octane works How food preservation works How beer works How holding your breath works How smoke detectors work How heat pumps work How your night vision works How concentrating solar collectors work How your key fob works How the common cold works How the Large Hadron Collider Works How making a TV show works How dry cleaning works How exoskeletons work How an oil refinery works How landfills work How the Orion spacecraft works The cutting edge in HDTV Redefining the CD How the HDMI cable scam works How glow-in-the-dark toys work How the subprime mortgage crisis works How gift cards work How Tasers work How giant TV screens work How foreclosure works How Air Force One works How wildfire fighting works How vitamins work How ejection seats work How reattaching limbs works How hot air balloons work How paparazzi work How counterfeiting works How CDs work How the Edsel worked How Stinger missiles work How hybrid cars work How sharks work How mosquitoes work How diesel engines work How water towers work How the Dawn mission works How Kassam rockets work How the North American Eagle works Why aren't we flying to work? How tofu and soy milk work How Colony Collapse Disorder works How airbags work How the U.S. income tax works How gum works How caffeine works How Daylight Saving Time works How a cruise missile works How snow making works © 2007, How Stuff Works Inc. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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