An open-hearth furnace is an industrial furnace in which excess carbon and other impurities are burnt out of pig iron to produce steel, using regenerative preheating in which brick-filled flues capture heat from exhaust gases and return it to the incoming fuel and air. The engineer Carl Wilhelm Siemens developed the regenerative furnace concept in the 1850s, and the French engineer Pierre-Émile Martin licensed the design from Siemens in 1865 and was first to apply it successfully to steelmaking, giving the resulting method its common name, the Siemens-Martin process. The open-hearth furnace displaced the faster but less controllable Bessemer process through the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth century because it allowed closer control of the steels composition and could recycle scrap metal, before most furnaces were decommissioned by the early 1990s in favor of basic oxygen and electric arc furnaces.
Facts
SignificanceThe open-hearth furnace's rapid production of large quantities of basic steel, suited to construction uses such as high-rise buildings, let it complement the faster but harder-to-control Bessemer process until basic oxygen steelmaking superseded both in the twentieth century. 1 FAQs
What advantages did the open-hearth furnace have over the Bessemer process?
It avoided nitrogen embrittlement, was easier to control, and could recycle scrap.
It had three main advantages. It did not embrittle the steel through excessive exposure to nitrogen, it was easier to control, and it allowed large amounts of scrap iron and steel to be melted and refined. The process was slower than the Bessemer converter, and that slowness is what made it easier to control and to sample for quality.
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In Field
Source Open-Hearth Furnace (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Invented By
Source Open-Hearth Furnace (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Sources
1. Open-Hearth Furnace (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationLead section, Martin licensing sentence
In 1865, the French engineer Pierre-Émile Martin took out a licence from Siemens and first applied his regenerative furnace for making steel.
History section, appealing characteristic sentence
The most appealing characteristic of the Siemens regenerative furnace is the rapid production of large quantities of basic steel, used for example to construct high-rise buildings.
- In Group: Ferrous Metallurgy Processing Furnaces, lead sentence, 'industrial furnace in which excess carbon and other impurities are burnt out of pig iron to produce steel'
Invented By: Carl Wilhelm Siemens, Lead section
The open-hearth furnace was first developed by German/British engineer Carl Wilhelm Siemens.
In Field: Materials Engineering, Introduction
An open-hearth furnace is any of several kinds of industrial furnace in which excess carbon and other impurities are burnt out of pig iron to produce steel.
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