Foundry technologies
Foundry| Founding, or casting, is the process of forming metal objects by melting metal and pouring it into molds. A foundry is a commercial establishment for founding or producing castings. Significant in these definitions is the use of liquid metal to cast the shape of the object directly, producing cast metal. Wrought metal products differ from...
Metals| It is known that metals are very important in our life. Metals have the greatest importance for industry. All machines and other engineering constructions have metal parts; some of them consist only of metal parts. There are two large groups of metals:...
Ferrous Metals| Ferrous metals are used in industry in two general forms: cast iron and steel. These two ferrous alloys are usually produced from pig iron and they have different carbon content. Articles of cast iron are made of pig iron which is received from the blast furnace in the form of pigs, remelted in...
Non-ferrous metals| Non-ferrous metals are generally more expensive per pound than the ferrous metals, and are used only when some characteristic not possessed by iron or steel is essential or desirable in application. Some of these characteristics...
Alloys| An alloy is a relatively homogeneous metallic material which is not a chemical element. The constituents of any alloy must be soluble in each other in the molten state, otherwise the resulting solid will have no uniformity of structure. Gold and lead dissolve in...
The Blast Furnace| Ferrous metals are alloys of iron with carbon; these alloys may contain also some other elements such as silicon (Si), phosphorus (P), etc., but carbon is the most important of all elements present in ferrous alloys.Ferrous metals are used in...
The Bessemer converter| In the Bessemer process of making steel air is blown through the molten pig iron, and the oxygen of the air combines with the carbon, manganese, and silicon of the pig iron. This action generates heat and frees the iron from...
The open hearth furnace| The open hearth process is one of the most important methods of making steel. It is much slower than the Bessemer but it is easier to control, and for that reason it is more frequently used. The open hearth process takes from eight to twelve hours, so that there is plenty of time for accurate analysis. The quality of steel...
The electric furnace| Where the cost of electrical energy is high, the electric process is more expensive in operation than the Bessemer or open hearth process. In this case only the finest grades of steel are produced by the electric furnace method. Stainless and heat resistant steels are made almost exclusively by...
The crucible furnace| The crucible way is the oldest one used for making high carbon steel and special steels. High carbon steel is made by melting scrap steel in a crucible about 20 inches high and one foot in diameter, made of graphite which...