Steel Making Raw Material

Description of raw material for steel mills

Steel is one kind of alloy, made of iron and carbon. The carbon content is usually less than two percent and for manganese, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, and oxygen，the the content is even smaller. Steel is the most important engineering and building materials in the world. In the basic steel making process, the impurities, such as nitrogen, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur and excess carbon (which is the most important impurities) are removed from the source iron. To produce different grades of steel, some different alloying elements such as manganese, nickel, chromium, carbon, and vanadium need to add.

The Steel-making Process

There are two main business processes for steelmaking: blast furnace basic oxygen steelmaking (using blast furnace liquid pig iron and scrap as the main feedstock) and electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking, which uses scrap or direct reduced iron (DRI) as the main feedstock. Oxygen steelmaking provides fuel mainly through the exothermic properties of the reaction inside the vessel. Instead, in EAF steelmaking, electrical energy is used to melt solid waste and/or DRI materials. In recent years, with more chemical energy introduced into the process, the development of EAF steelmaking technology has approached that of oxygen steelmaking.

The main difference between routes is the type of raw material they consume. For the BF-BOF route, it is mainly iron ore, coal, and recycled steel, while the EAF route uses recycled steel and electricity to produce steel. Depending on the configuration of the plant and the availability of recycled steel, other metallic iron sources such as direct reduced iron (DRI) or molten iron can also be used in the EAF route. Depending on the configuration of the plant and the availability of recycled steel, other metallic iron sources such as direct reduced iron (DRI) or molten iron can also be used in the EAF route.

The principle of steel-making is to use oxygen or iron oxide to remove the excess carbon and other impurities contained in pig iron into gas or slag under high temperature.

HUARO as one of the stainless steel raw material suppliers can provide different kinds of raw material required for steel manufacturing, raw materials for steel production like iron ore, iron ore concentrate，HBI (Hot briquetted iron), DRI (Direct Reduced Iron) and steel pellets.