The steelmaking process involves producing steel from iron ore. Essential impurities such as nitrogen, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, and excess carbon are removed from the base iron. Other elements such as manganese, nickel, chromium, and vanadium are added to create different grades of steel.
The basic infrastructure for steel manufacturing includes coke ovens and coal chemical plants, sintering plants, blast furnaces, steelmaking plants and rolling mills. This can be done through basic oxygen furnaces or electric arc furnaces.
In the first method, hot metal from the blast furnace is fed into a basic oxygen furnace after pretreatment and impurities removal. Molten steel is produced in liquid form and impurities are removed in gaseous form and as slag.
In the electric arc furnace process, scrap steel is melted using an electric arc generated by graphite electrodes. This can be used as ingots or fed into continuous casting processes. Gases and synthetic gases are also used in modern steelmaking. These are alternatives to blast furnace steelmaking methods that use oxygen.
Applications include blast furnace or coke gas, Corex gas, oxygen, steam, nitrogen and hydrogen. Acids are used in pickling plants to clean the surface of steel plates to remove rust.
Cooling water, steam and hot water are used at various locations throughout the steel plant.
Steel mills primarily use large butterfly valves for gas applications, or large gate and double-plate check valves. Where high-temperature applications are involved, metal-seated triple-offset valves are used. Gate, globe, check, and ball valves are smaller and suitable for a variety of utility applications.
