There are lots of kinds of various technologies to produce steel in today. To understand these technologies, you need to understand the most basic explanations of steelmaking processes. We explained that the steelmaking process is called as ‘Basic Oxygen Furnaces’, and we strongly recommend you to read that article. In this article, we will explain the other steelmaking process that is done with ‘Electric Arc Furnaces’.
What Is Electric Arc Furnace?
The capacity of electric arc furnaces are not high as basic oxygen furnaces. The entire melting of the scrap iron and steel nearly takes 2 hours, and production rate is about 5-15 tons, which is very low compared to the production rate of basic oxygen furnaces.
Electric arc furnaces can be used with pig iron but today, these are used 100% of scrap iron and scrap steel that are produced from other manufacturing processes. The scrap iron and scrap steel are poured into the electric arc furnaces. Lime is again also added as fluxing agent. The removable roof of these furnaces are also protective to excessive slag formation on the molten material. Required alooying elements are added to the molten material. The tapping of the produced steel is achieved by tilting of the entire furnace.
Electric arc flows between very large electrodes, through the charge to melt it.
We stated that the production rates of electric arc furnaces are lower than the basic oxygen furnace. Cost per ton is higher than the steel that produced with basic oxygen furnaces. But, quality of produced stell is much more higher than the basic oxygen furnaces. Because of that, steel that is produced with electric arc furnaces are used as stainless steels and tool steels etc.
Explanation of the working principle can be summarized as above. Do not forget to leave your comments and questions below about ‘Electric Arc Furnaces’!
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