Basic oxygen steelmaking

Basic oxygen steelmaking (BOS, BOP, BOF, OSM, Linz-Donawitz-Verfahren, LD-converter, Oxygen Converter Process[1]) is a method of primary steelmaking in which carbon-rich molten pig iron is made into steel. Blowing oxygen through molten pig iron lowers the carbon content of the alloy and changes it into low-carbon steel. The process is known as basic due to the pH of the refractoriescalcium oxide and magnesium oxidethat line the vessel to withstand the high temperature of molten metal. The process was developed in 1948 by Robert Durrer and commercialized in 19521953 by Austrian VOEST and AMG. The LD converter, named after the Austrian towns Linz and Donawitz (a district of Leoben) is a refined version of the Bessemer converter where blowing of air is replaced with blowing oxygen. It reduced capital cost of the plants, time of smelting, and increased labor productivity. Between 1920 and 2000, labor requirements in the industry decreased by a factor of 1,000, from more than 3 worker-hours per tonne to just 0.003.[2] The vast majority of steel manufactured in the world is produced using the basic oxygen furnace; in 2000, it accounted for 60% of global steel output.[2] Modern furnaces will take a charge of iron of up to 350 tons and convert it into steel in less than 40 minutes, compared to 1012 hours in an open hearth furnace.

History
The basic oxygen process developed outside of traditional "big steel" environment. It was developed and refined by a single man, Swiss engineer Robert Durrer, and commercialized by two small steel companies in allied-occupied Austria, which had not yet recovered from the destruction of World War II.[3] In 1858, Henry Bessemer patented a steelmaking process involving oxygen blowing for decarburizing molten iron (UK Patent No. 2207).[3] For nearly a hundred years commercial quantities of oxygen were not available at all or were too expensive, and the invention remained unused.[3] During the World War II German (C. V. Schwartz), Belgian (John Miles) and Swiss (Durrer and Heinrich Heilbrugge) engineers proposed their versions of oxygenblown steelmaking, but only Durrer and Heilbrugge brought it to mass-scale production.[3] In 1943, Durrer, formerly a professor at the Berlin Institute of Technology, returned to Switzerland and accepted a seat on the board of Roll AG, the country's largest steel mill.[3] In 1947 he purchased the first small 2.5-ton experimental converter from the U. S., and on April 3, 1948 the new converter produced its first steel.[3] The new process could conveniently process large amounts of scrap metal with only a small proportion of primary metal necessary.[4] In the summer of 1948 Roll AG and two Austrian state-owned companies, VOEST and AMG, agreed to commercialize the Durrer process.[4] By June 1949, VOEST developed an adaptation of Durrer's process, the LD (Linz-Donawitz) process.[5][6] In December 1949, the VOEST and the AMG committed to building their first 30-ton oxygen converters.[6] They were put into operation in November 1952 (VOEST in Linz) and May 1953 (AMG, Donawitz)[6] and temporarily became the leading edge of the world's steelmaking, causing a surge in steel-related research.[7] 34 thousand businesspeople and engineers visited the VOEST converter by 1963.[7] The LD process reduced processing

time and capital costs per ton of steel, contributing to the competitive advantage of Austrian steel.[5] VOEST eventually acquired the rights to market the new technology.[6] However, errors made by the VOEST and the AMG management in licensing their technology made control over its adoption in Japan impossible and by the end of the 1950s the Austrians lost their competitive edge.[5] The original LD process employed blowing oxygen on top of molten iron through a watercooled nozzle of a vertical lance. In the 1960s steelmakers introduced bottom-blown converters and introduced inert gas blowing for stirring the molten metal and removing of phosphorus impurities.[2] The big American steelmakers did not catch up to the new technology; the first oxygen converters in the United States were launched in the end of 1954 by McLouth Steel in Trenton, Michigan, which had less than 1 per cent of the national steel market. [2] U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel introduced oxygen process only in 1964.[2] Elsewhere, owing to the Austrian licensing blunder, the technology was adopted quickly. By 1970 half of world's and 80% of Japan's steel output was produced in oxygen converters.[2] In the last quarter of the 20th century basic oxygen converters were gradually substituted with the electric arc furnaces. In Japan the share of LD process decreased from 80% in 1970 to 70% in 2000; worldwide share of the basic oxygen process stabilized at 60%.[2]

Process
The basic oxygen steel-making process is as follows: 1. Molten pig iron (sometimes referred to as "hot metal") from a blast furnace is poured into a large refractory-lined container called a ladle; 2. The metal in the ladle is sent directly for basic oxygen steelmaking or to a pretreatment stage. Pretreatment of the blast furnace metal is used to reduce the refining load of sulfur, silicon, and phosphorus. In desulfurising pretreatment, a lance is lowered into the molten iron in the ladle and several hundred kilograms of powdered magnesium are added. Sulfur impurities are reduced to magnesium sulfide in a violent exothermic reaction. The sulfide is then raked off. Similar pretreatment is possible for desiliconisation and dephosphorisation using mill scale (iron oxide) and lime as reagents. The decision to pretreat depends on the quality of the blast furnace metal and the required final quality of the BOS steel. 3. Filling the furnace with the ingredients is called charging. The BOS process is autogenous: the required thermal energy is produced during the process. Maintaining the proper charge balance, the ratio of hotmetal to scrap, is therefore very important. The BOS vessel is one-fifth filled with steel scrap. Molten iron from the ladle is added as required by the charge balance. A typical chemistry of hotmetal charged into the BOS vessel is: 4% C, 0.20.8% Si, 0.08%0.18% P, and 0.010.04% S. 4. The vessel is then set upright and a water-cooled lance is lowered down into it. The lance blows 99% pure oxygen onto the steel and iron, igniting the carbon dissolved in the steel and burning it to form carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, causing the temperature to rise to about 1700C. This melts the scrap, lowers the carbon content of the molten iron and helps remove unwanted chemical elements. It is this use of oxygen instead of air that improves upon the Bessemer process, for the nitrogen (and other gases) in air do not react with the charge as oxygen does. High purity oxygen is

blown into the furnace or BOS vessel through a vertically oriented water-cooled lance with velocities faster than Mach 1.[8] 5. Fluxes (burnt lime or dolomite) are fed into the vessel to form slag, which absorbs impurities of the steelmaking process. During blowing the metal in the vessel forms an emulsion with the slag, facilitating the refining process. Near the end of the blowing cycle, which takes about 20 minutes, the temperature is measured and samples are taken. The samples are tested and a computer analysis of the steel given within six minutes. A typical chemistry of the blown metal is 0.30.6% C, 0.050.1% Mn, 0.010.03% Si, 0.010.03% S and P. 6. The BOS vessel is tilted again and the steel is poured into a giant ladle. This process is called tapping the steel. The steel is further refined in the ladle furnace, by adding alloying materials to give the steel special properties required by the customer. Sometimes argon or nitrogen gas is bubbled into the ladle to make sure the alloys mix correctly. The steel now contains 0.11% carbon. The more carbon in the steel, the harder it is, but it is also more brittle and less flexible. 7. After the steel is removed from the BOS vessel, the slag, filled with impurities, is poured off and cooled.