Microwave Steelmaking

Makarand writes "Researchers at the Michigan Technological University are working on a low-cost steelmaking process which uses microwaves to heat iron ore instead of conventional heating. Their steelmaking facility was made of magnetrons from six household microwaves wired together and an electric arc furnace. When fed iron oxide and coal, the microwave energy could reduce the iron ore to iron within minutes and the electric arc furnace smelted the iron and coal into steel. The steel industry is taking a closer look at this new process which could cut steel production costs by upto 50%."

Comments

Science can do anything!

[Zemrec]

First they find the cure for cancer is the common cold, and now they can put metal in a microwave!! Maybe next they'll find the cause of belly button lint.

Re:Science can do anything!

[PD]

The cause of belly button lint is belly buttons. There's a 100% positive correlation.

Re:Science can do anything!

[femto]

The belly button lint one's been pretty well solved!

Good news, if it works

[ctr2sprt]

This is great news for US steelmakers. Like all other industries that rely on unskilled labor, steel manufacturers have been in a prolonged slump while business moves overseas. If this works out, we can implement it and become competitive again.

You see, free trade can do good things for the average worker. Though to be fair "good things" in this case means fewer steelworkers will lose their jobs instead of all of them. Still, it's improvement, and who knows? If our costs really drop by 50%, demand very well could increase enough to justify keeping all the old workers around.

(I didn't really have anything to say, but the only other posts with scores higher than zero were... Well, if you've been on Slashdot for more than five minutes, you know what they were like.)

Re:Good news, if it works

[dnahelix]

Or they can implement it in a 3rd-World country and MAKE EVEN MORE MONEY!

Re:Good news, if it works

[bluGill]

Not nessicarly. Most third world countries don't have reliable power. If you have molten iron, and the power goes out, you have to empty everything fast, because once it solidifies it will crack the containers when you try to remove it. (as it cools it contracts, when you melt it, it expands. think frozen water)

Remember too that energy is cheap in the US. I doupt any third world country really has a major advantage there. Perhaps Iceland, with all their geo-thermo, they have already locked up aluminium, but are they third world?

There are a lot of issues. If you want a custom shape from your supplier it is much easier to get it from one in your town than a third world nation. If your factory is automatied enough, labor costs aren't significant anyway, (it is all skilled labor which you would have to import to the third world country) so what is the point in moving.

Most of the "japanese" car manufactors have factorys in the US. You can have a profitable manufactoring company in the US, if you run it right.

Re:Good news, if it works

[bluGill]

Right, unfortunatly water is a strange thing, acting very different from most other materials. It hits the minimun density at about 4 degrees C. That is it contracts as it cools until it gets 4, then it starts expanding.

Iron does in fact contract when it solidifies. As it contracts it pulls more and more iron (okay a very tiny amount more) in. When you heat something containing solid iron, that iron needs to go someplace. Heat from the bottom of a container, and the bottom will melt first, and expand, but there is solid iron above it, so something has to give. Often that is the container.

Re:Good news, if it works

[identity0]

Not nessesarily. Assembly plants and factories don't need much energy compared to smelting/ore refining operations, and I don't think on-site generation is practical for those purposes. I know the big aluminum plants in Oregon are fed off of the grid because they were shut down during the energy crisis in Cali. a while back. All the spare energy from hydro power on the Columbia river was diverted south. Backups were not there because there were no economical way to supply the power needed. Keep in mind that the U.S. probobly has cheaper energy rates for industrial uses than most third world countries because of our existing infastructure and generating plants. Even if you could build a power plant next to the steel mill, will that be cheaper than getting power off the grid in the U.S.?

Re:Good news, if it works

[ColaMan]

Ok, a few basic principles of steel manufacture.

In order to make iron, iron ore and coal (well, coke actually) are dropped in layers in an operating blast furnace. The coke burns in the furnace and as a consequence reduces the iron ore to iron, as well as supplying enough heat to keep the contents of the bottom of the furnace molten.

So, you need coal to make coke to make iron... to make steel and such.

Bad Things happen if the blast furnace runs out of coke, Very Bad Things in fact, so these pretty much run 24x7, meaning you've normally got a giant stockpile of coal to cover any conceivable loss of supply (normally a few weeks supply).
So... if you've got all these ludicrous amounts of coal around (stockpiles of 100,000t are not uncommon) and a giant energy requirement, you can easily and economically build an on-site power station to power the rest of the system.

And the fun part is you can sell your excess capacity to the grid at a profit for a good 10 or 15 years, because you built your plant larger than you needed to allow for growth in your steel mill.

(Aluminium plants use an entirely different process, of which the only part I know about is they use an obscene amount of electricity and no coal required as in a blast furnace.)

Re:Good news, if it works

[larkost]

Having toured an aluminum fly casting plant, I saw the gigantic magneto-constrictor melting pots that they use, and was told specifically that they relied on Wisconsin Electric for their power.

What they do is to have a bunch of huge electromagnets and pulse them rapidly. This causes the electrons in the container to jitter producing the heat needed. It was all very interesting, and molten aluminum is one of the most beautiful thins I have aver seen.

Re:Good news, if it works

[SubtleNuance]

Though to be fair "good things" in this case means fewer steelworkers will lose their jobs instead of all of them. Still, it's improvement, and who knows? If our costs really drop by 50%, demand very well could increase enough to justify keeping all the old workers around.

Bzzt wrong. You see, in $under-industrialized-nation the workers will work for $0.50 an hour in this Microwave Steel Foundry. Just like they do in the current foundries.

Your assertion that reducing costs "here" will keep jobs "here... not so, those technologies will just be used abroad to reduce *THERE* costs as well.

As long as there is inequality in labour standards, pay-rates, environmental-standards, taxes, health and safety standards, etc etc etc capitalists will seek to exploit the weakest standards -- this is why 'free trade' does not work.

On the other hand, Fair Trade is possible by realizing this reality and seeing that these things are considered in the economy, else, the lowest 'standards' will always get the job.... this is called "The Race to the Bottom." Its what is going to slap America's middle class in the face shortly.

My liege?

[NanoGator]

" The steel industry is taking a closer look at this new process which could cut steel production costs by upto 50%"

I'm glad somebody finally hit that research button. I can't make any more villagers.

Re:Efficieny

[bluGill]

If you bursh up on your thermodynamics you will notice that simple fuels (say coal) cannot reach 50% efficency). Iron melts close to the flame tempature of some fuels. Run the calculations of efficency, and 50% looks really good.

Of course real industry uses electric a lot. However resisance (ohms law), while in theory 100% efficent has downsides. The heating elements are fragil, and that is assuming you can find one that doesn't melt at less than the tempature of liquid iron. Typically carbon arc furances are used, which means you replace carbon rods once in a while.

Induction heating is common in industry. I'm not sure where, or for what purposes, but I know it is used. I don't know how it compares to this process.

Re:For america lets hope not

[Anonymous Coward]

This story is yet another example of what makes the USA great.

The inventor, Jiann-Yang (Jim) Hwang, came from Taiwan to the U.S. to pursue his graduate studies. (Here's his resume.) He graduates from Purdue with a Ph.D., and 20 years later, he's a professor of materials science at Michigan Technological University, and is adding to the collective innovating efforts of our nation.

Personally, I'm all for smart, hard-working people immigrating to the U.S. and staying here. All those temp workers in the technical industry who have come over here from India? All those people from Ecuador who are willing to work like dogs in the restaurant industry? All those people from Eastern Europe who are filled with the entrepreneurial sprit? Don't give them visas, make them citizens!

Re:Efficieny

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Induction heating is not used in bulk steelmaking. It's very useful for heating materials in a vacuum and for heating the surface skin of steel. By only heating the surface skin, you can harden it and leave the insides tough and non-brittle. Or "crunchy on the outside, chewy in the center" as a metalurgical engineer would say.

since no one else jumped on this one

[maddh]

...eliminating the need for high-cost coke.

finished rehab?

Implications for other planets?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since this technique is a lot more efficient than using conventional methods, how feasible would it be to make a portable steelmaking machine? Say.. that was small enough to be lifted by rocket to another planet.

The idea being, of course, that you feed rock and electricity in one end of a smallish box and get steel out the other. Would this be useful for making a base on the moon or mars? Huh?

Sadly Companies are Greedy

[Bruha]

Why would they rehire american workers if they get another way to raise their profits?

I read the article and I'm confused...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

The article talks about replacing the blast furnace with this microwave-based device and using it to make steel. Well, a blast furnace doesn't make steel, it makes pig iron, a different and much less useful material. According to what I've read, another process such as a bessemer converter is needed to turn the pig iron into steel.

I seem to recall that you have to blow hot air or oxygen through the melt to burn out excess carbon to convert the pig iron to steel. Maybe he hasn't gotten that far developing the process.

If indeed he has found a way to go from ore straight to steel, this is a pretty valuable process. There just isn't enough information to tell.

Re:I read the article and I'm confused...

[rainwalker]

He then put iron oxide and coal inside. In a matter of minutes, the microwave energy reduced the iron ore to iron, and the electric arc furnace smelted the iron and coal into steel.

Sounds like he did, (IANAMetallurgist), although you are right, the article is really vague. Amusing how two adjacent sentences refer to adding "iron oxide" and "iron ore", which are completely different.

Re:I read the article and I'm confused...

[Drishmung]

Even so, steel is very cheap to manufacture. By the ton, it is one of the cheapest structural materials. And I mean mild steel here, not pig iron. By contrast, Al and it's alloys are far more expensive, and plastics even more so.

However, most people are not very interested in mild steel by the ton. They want manufactured goods, and there things change. The hardness, toughness and high melting point of steel make it relatively expensive to manufacture. So much so that it's not really worth re-cycling iron scrap in small quantities---the raw material is so cheap that the processing and transportation costs make it uneconomic. It's easy to re-cycle beer cans though---just melt them at (relatively) low temperature and you have your raw material back for much less than it costs to process bauxite.

Plastics, despite the high raw material cost are typically extremely cheap to manufacture (though often expensive to recycle for various reasons).

So, if you can halve the cost of making mild steel, or even the cost of making pig iron, that's not going to add up to a lot of saving on the cost of your new car. It won't even halve the cost of the product leaving the steel factory's gates, since that product is , AFAIK, not 'raw' steel, but some form of at least partially manufactured product such as steel plate at the very least.

Oh Yeah Great

[Anonymous Coward]

This may be a big timesaver, but, unfortunately, this process gives the steel a rubbery texture, and the middle always comes out frozen.

Not Exactly New

[core plexus]

I remember reading about using microwaves for certain refractory ores, I'm pretty sure one of them was "Microwave Heating of Chemicals and Minerals", 1995. They have also used microwaves in the treatment of gold ore, and microwaves for the embrittlement of coal. I haven't heard of it being used on any but a lab scale yet, though.

Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets

Re:Hehe!

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Why not? As long as there aren't sharp points to it, you can put spoons and such in a wave. I usualy put a spoon in a cup when I heat it in a wave. (Supposingly this prevents that parts in the liquid superheat and splash hot liquid around when disturbed.)

Bah!

[deacon]

Unskilled Labor my Ass.

Do you have any idea on the multiple steps needed to make any particular alloy of steel?

No?

Do you know how to check the ore for sulfur?

How about too much Phophorus?

No again?

Do you know when and why to add lime?

Hmmmm????

Lets try an easy one: What are the alloying elements in 4140 Steel? No looking it up online, after all, this is unskilled knowledge!!!!!

How about the time and temperature schedule for heat treating 6061 alloy Aluminium to the T5 State???

So, you have no knowledge about metals at all, other than that they are (sometimes) shiny?

So where do you get off denigrating the skills of people who can do something which you have no idea how to even start?

Of all the things I loath, the arrogance of people who call a task they could not do if I held a blowtorch to their genitalia and their life depended on it "Unskilled" is near the top of the list.