How Iron and Steel Work

by Marshall Brain and Robert Lamb

Browse the article How Iron and Steel Work

Introduction to How Iron and Steel Work

English School/The Bridgeman Art Gallery/Getty Images

These daggers are an example of the kind of superior weaponry that Iron Age civilizations
were able to craft.

If you were to follow humanity's genetic trail back through the millennia, you'd find primitive
creatures fumbling for a foothold on a primeval Earth. Lacking the natural, physical advantages of
other animals, it's a marvel humans were able to claw their way out of the Cenozoic era at all. Of
course, Homo sapiens had one advantage over all the other animals: the ability to make and use
tools. While they lacked a lion's teeth and claws or a deer's defensive antlers, they learned to
craft their own weapons from the world around them.

The oldest known tools date back 2.6 million years, to a time when humans used shaped stone to
carry out a variety of tasks [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica]. After all, a sharpened rock can
potentially slice, stab, scrape, pound and bludgeon. In time, humans began to specialize their
tools, creating everything from arrowheads to pestles for grinding grain. Yet stone is a brittle,
inflexible medium. Eventually, they were able to pinpoint more durable and malleable elements
and their alloys: first copper, then bronze and iron. Instead of flaking or fracturing under blunt
force, they proved malleable.

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If you had to name the technologies that had the greatest effect on modern society, the refining of
the heavy metal element iron would have to be near the top. Iron makes up a huge array of
modern products. especially carbon-rich, commercial iron, which we call steel. Cars, tractors,
bridges, trains (and their rails), tools, skyscrapers, guns and ships all depend on iron and steel to
make them strong. Iron is so important that primitive societies are measured by the point at which
they learn how to refine it. This is where the "Iron Age" classification comes from.

Have you ever wondered how people refine iron and steel? You've probably heard of iron ore, but
how do we turn a slab of rock into a set of stainless steel surgical instruments or a locomotive? In
this article, you'll learn all about iron and steel.

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The Advantages of Iron

Dex Image/Dex Image/Getty Images

A skilled blacksmith can work heated iron into just about any shape imaginable.

Iron is an incredibly useful substance. It's less brittle than stone yet, compared to wood or copper,
extremely strong. If properly heated, iron is also relatively easy to shape into various forms, as
well as refine, using simple tools. And speaking of those tools, unlike wood, iron can handle high
temperatures, allowing us to build everything from fire tongs to furnaces out of it. In contrast to
most substances, you can also magnetize iron, making it useful in the creation of electric motors
and generators. Finally, there certainly aren't any iron shortages to worry about. The Earth's crust
is 5 percent iron, and in some areas, the element concentrates in ores that contain as much as 70
percent iron.

When you compare iron and steel with something like aluminum, you can see why it was so
important historically. To refine aluminum, you need access to huge quantities of electricity.
Furthermore, to shape aluminum, you have to either cast it or extrude it. Iron, however, is much
easier to manipulate. The element has been useful to people for thousands of years, while
aluminum really didn't exist in any meaningful way until the 20th century.

Aluminum: The Precious Metal

Ease of production plays a huge role in defining
 a material's worth. The 10-inch (25-centimeter)
pyramid at the tip of the Washington Monument
is actually made of aluminum rather than gold,
because gold was less valuable than aluminum
in 1884.

Fortunately, iron can be created relatively easily with tools that were available to primitive
societies. There will likely come a day when humans become so technologically advanced that
iron is completely replaced by aluminum, plastics and things like carbon and glass fibers. But
right now, the economic equation gives inexpensive iron and steel a huge advantage over these
much more expensive alternatives.

The only real problem with iron and steel is rust. Fortunately, you can control rust by painting,
galvanizing, chrome plating or coating the iron with a sacrificial anode, which corrodes faster
than the stronger metal. Think of this last option as hiring a bodyguard to take a bullet for the
president. The more active metal has to almost completely corrode before the less active iron or
steel begins the process.

Humans have come up with countless uses for iron, from carpentry tools and culinary equipment
to complicated machinery and instruments of torture. Before iron can be put to any of these uses,
however, it has to be mined from the ground.

Iron Ore

© iStockphoto.com/Susan Daniels
It may not look like much, but this lump of iron ore is the starting point of everything from
precision surgical equipment to reinforced skyscrapers.

Before many ancient civilizations began to transition from their bronze age to an iron age, some
toolmakers were already creating iron implements from a cosmic source: meteorites. Called
'black copper" by the Egyptians, meteoric iron isn't the sort of substance one finds in huge,
consolidated locations. Rather, craftsmen found bits and pieces of it spread across great
distances. As such, this heavenly metal was mostly used in jewelry and ornamentation. While
blacksmiths occasionally used meteoric iron to craft swords, these prized weapons were usually
relegated to men of great power, such as the seventh century Caliphs, whose blades were said to
have been forged from the same material as the Holy Black Stone of Mecca [source: Rickard].

The majority of Earth's iron, however, exists in iron ore. Mined right out of the ground, raw ore is
mix of ore proper and loose earth called gangue. The ore proper can usually be separated by
crushing the raw ore and simply washing away the lighter soil. Breaking down the ore proper is
more difficult, however, as it is a chemical compound of carbonates, hydrates, oxides, silicates,
sulfides and various impurities.

To get to the bits of iron in the ore, you have to smelt it out. Smelting involves heating up ore until
the metal becomes spongy and the chemical compounds in the ore begin to break down. Most
important, it releases oxygen from the iron ore, which makes up a high percentage of common
iron ores.

The most primitive facility used to smelt iron is a bloomery. There, a blacksmith burns charcoal
with iron ore and a good supply of oxygen (provided by a bellows or blower). Charcoal is
essentially pure carbon. The carbon combines with oxygen to create carbon dioxide and carbon
monoxide (releasing lots of heat in the process). Carbon and carbon monoxide combine with the
oxygen in the iron ore and carry it away, leaving iron metal.

In a bloomery, the fire doesn't get hot enough to melt the iron completely. Instead, the iron heats
up into a spongy mass containing iron and silicates from the ore. Heating and hammering this
mass (called the bloom) forces impurities out and mixes the glassy silicates into the iron metal to
create wrought iron. Wrought iron is hardy and easy to work, making it perfect for creating tools.

Tool and weapon makers learned to smelt copper long before iron became the dominant metal.
Archeological evidence suggests that blacksmiths in the Middle East were smelting iron as early
as 2500 B.C., though it would be more than a thousand years before iron became the dominant
metal in the region.

To create higher qualities of iron, blacksmiths would require better furnaces. The technology
gradually developed over the centuries. By the mid-1300s, taller furnaces and manually operated
bellows allowed European furnaces to burn hot enough to not just soften iron, but actually melt it.

Creating Iron
 China Photos/Getty Images News/Getty Images
A worker covers the steel slag poured on the ground with sandy soil at a stainless steel
factory.

The more advanced way to smelt iron is in a blast furnace. A blast furnace is charged with iron
ore, charcoal or coke (coke is charcoal made from coal) and limestone (CaCO3). Huge quantities
of air blast in at the bottom of the furnace, and the calcium in the limestone combines with the
silicates to form slag. Liquid iron collects at the bottom of the blast furnace, underneath a layer of
slag. The blacksmith periodically lets the liquid iron flow out and cool.

At this point, the liquid iron typically flows through a channel and into a bed of sand. Once it cools,
this metal is known as pig iron. To create a ton of pig iron, you start with 2 tons (1.8 metric tons)
of ore, 1 ton of coke (0.9 metric tons) and a half ton (0.45 metric tons) of limestone. The fire
consumes 5 tons (4.5 metric tons) of air. The temperature at the core of the blast furnace reaches
nearly 3,000 degrees F (about 1,600 degrees C).

Iron Advantage
Between the 15th and 20th centuries, some
countries had an industrial leg up on the
competition due to the availability of iron ore
deposits. For example, China, India, England,
the United States, France, Germany, Spain and
Russia all have substantial iron ore deposits.
When you think of the historical importance of all
of these countries, you can see the correlation!

Pig iron contains 4 to 5 percent carbon and is so hard and brittle that it's almost useless. If you
want to do anything with it, you have three options. First, you can melt it, mix it with slag and
hammer it out to eliminate most of the carbon (down to 0.3 percent) and create strong, malleable
wrought iron. The second option is to melt the pig iron and combine it with scrap iron, smelt out
impurities and add alloys to form cast iron. This metal contains 2 to 4 percent carbon, along with
quantities of silicon, manganese and trace impurities. Cast iron, as the name implies, is typically
cast into molds to form a wide variety of parts and products.
The third option for pig iron is to push the refining process even further and create steel, which
we'll examine on the next page.

Creating Steel

Sean Gallup/Getty Images News/Getty Images

A ladle filled with molten iron approaches a blast furnace that will convert it to liquid steel.

Steel is iron that has most of the impurities removed. Steel also has a consistent concentration of
carbon throughout (0.5 to 1.5 percent). Impurities like silica, phosphorous and sulfur weaken steel
tremendously, so they must be eliminated. The advantage of steel over iron is greatly improved
strength.

The open-hearth furnace is one way to create steel from pig iron. The pig iron, limestone and
iron ore go into an open-hearth furnace. It is heated to about 1,600 degrees F (871 degrees C).
The limestone and ore form a slag that floats on the surface. Impurities, including carbon, are
oxidized and float out of the iron into the slag. When the carbon content is right, you have carbon
steel.

Another way to create steel from pig iron is the Bessemer process, which involves the oxidation
of the impurities in the pig iron by blowing air through the molten iron in a Bessemer converter.
The heat of oxidation raises the temperature and keeps the iron molten. As the air passes
through the molten pig iron, impurities unite with the oxygen to form oxides. Carbon monoxide
burns off and the other impurities form slag.

However, most modern steel plants use what's called a basic oxygen furnace to create steel. The
advantage is speed, as the process is roughly 10 times faster than the open-hearth furnace. In
these furnaces, high-purity oxygen blows through the molten pig iron, lowering carbon, silicon,
manganese and phosphorous levels. The addition of chemical cleaning agents called fluxes help
to reduce the sulfur and phosphorous levels.

A variety of metals might be alloyed with the steel at this point to create different properties. For
example, the addition of 10 to 30 percent chromium creates stainless steel, which is very
resistant to rust. The addition of chromium and molybdenum creates chrome-moly steel, which is
strong and light.

When you think about it, there are two accidents of nature that have made it much easier for
human technology to advance and flourish. One is the huge availability of iron ore. The second is
the accessibility of vast quantities of oil and coal to power the production of iron. Without iron and
energy, we probably would not have gotten nearly as far as we have today.
Explore the links on the next page to learn even more about iron and steel.

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