About 4,000 years ago, during the Iron Age, man made and used iron tools for the first time. Iron ore is one of the most common minerals and raw materials today.
Perhaps the only thing that is mined on a larger scale is coal and construction equipment. For the production of raw iron and steel, more than 90% of iron ore is used in the metal industry.
Cast iron is a common brittle iron-carbon alloy with 2 to 4 percent carbon that may contain alloying elements including chromium, nickel, vanadium, aluminum, and other residual elements such as silicon, manganese, phosphorus, and sulfur.
Iron ore is converted into pig iron in a blast furnace. Pig iron is used to make shaped castings in foundries, although the majority (over 85%) of pig iron is converted into steel as pig iron.
The primary byproduct of iron ore processing is steel, a malleable alloy of iron, carbon, and alloying elements. High temperature strength, toughness, and the ability to change shape easily during hot and cold working are all characteristics of steel.
Depending on the chemical composition and heat treatment process, steel can also acquire special properties such as wear resistance and corrosion resistance. For this reason, steel is a very important construction material.
Products made of iron and steel are used in all aspects of industrial production, mostly in capital and engineering projects. For smelting ferrous metals, iron ore is used as a raw material. Iron ore that has been mined is often referred to as crude oil.
Pig iron ore is a source of iron that is used in the metal industry to make pig iron, metallized goods (DRI and HBI) as well as steel in small quantities.
Two types of iron ore raw materials are prepared (agglomerated) and natural (non-agglomerated). The first type of iron ore raw materials is ready for use in the blast furnace to make pig iron, while the second type of raw materials is used to produce agglomerate raw materials.
Sinter ore, direct transport ore and concentrate are examples of natural raw materials. Magnetic separation of low-grade ore is the main method of producing concentrate. The average iron recovery of concentrates is 80% and their iron content is between 60 and 65%.
High-grade, iron-rich ore is crushed to a fineness of less than 10 mm, screened, and crushed to create sinter (iron ore grains).
High-grade ore is also used to produce direct ore, which has a fineness between minus 70 and plus 10 mm. Porous or pelletized iron ore is commonly used as the primary feedstock for blast furnace processes. Pellets are only made from concentrate, while sinter is only made from ore.
By pelletizing the mixture into 1 cm pellets and then heating them to harden, the iron ore concentrate containing the limestone is pelletized.
Since hot briquetted iron is essentially a by-product of metallurgical extraction, it is not iron ore raw material in the traditional sense of the word.
As a raw material, sinter rock, siderite, limestone and iron-rich waste products (such as sediment, etc.) are combined to create sinter. Further, the mixture is cooked and pelletized.
grade (iron percentage) as well as the presence of useful elements (Mn, Ni, Cr, V, Ti), harmful impurities (S, P, As, Zn, Pb, Cu, K, Na) and lubricating components, the value of iron ore and define concentrates in the metal industry (oxides of Si, Ca, Mg and Al). Beneficial impurities in steel are natural alloying elements that enhance its properties
. Harmful impurities either affect the properties of the metal (sulfur and copper cause red shorting, phosphorus causes cold embrittlement, and arsenic and copper reduce welding properties) or make blast furnace operation more difficult (zinc damages blast furnace brickwork, lead It causes stove erosion, potassium and sodium facilitate condensation in the chimney system).
Sulfur content in commercial ore should not exceed 0.15%. Sulfur concentration in ore and concentrate should not exceed 0.6% to produce sinter and pellets because sintering and thermal hardening remove 60-90% of sulfur from the material.
Only 0.07-0.15% phosphorus can be found in ore, sinter and pellets. 0.05-0.1% of the blast furnace load iron ore portion is allowed to contain a maximum of 0.1-0.2% zinc and a maximum of 0.2% copper for making standard conversion pig iron.
Basic oxides (Ca, Mg) and acidic oxides are two types of components of slag (Si, Al). It is preferable to use rocks and concentrates that have a higher ratio of basic to acidic oxides, because in this case, the amount of flux raw materials in the subsequent metallurgical extraction is reduced.
Iron ores are natural mineral formations that contain amounts of iron and its compounds for industrial iron extraction. Despite the fact that all rocks contain iron to some extent, iron ores are known only as small concentrations of iron compounds from which metallic iron may be commercially recovered on a large scale.
Below is the classification of industrial forms of iron ore: titanomagnetite and ilmenite-titanomagnetite are found in basites and ultrabasitees, apatite-magnetite in carbonatites, magnetite and magnomagnetite in skarns, magnetite-hematite in banded iron formations, maritite . and martite-hydrohematite are found in weathered crusts.
Sintered iron ore (bulk iron ore concentrated by magnetic separation), sinter (porous lumps produced after heat treatment), and pellets are three forms of iron ore products used in the iron and steel industry. (The raw mass containing iron, which is usually smoothed with limestone. And it is formed into balls with a diameter of about 1 to 2 cm.
Composition: The most important iron ore is magnetite or lodestone, goethite or specularite (red iron ore), limonite or iron ore, which includes swamp iron ore and swamp rock and siderite or spatic iron ore (chalybite). The sphaerosiderite variety of iron ore is chemically an oxide, hydroxide, and carbonate of iron.
They exist naturally as metallic types. Any mixture of the above minerals – sometimes even close to them – with non-ferrous minerals such as clay, limestone or even with constituents of crystalline extruded rocks is usually their sprinkling. Although most of the time one mineral predominates and the others are allied, sometimes some of these minerals can be found in the same deposit.
Rich iron ore Rich iron ore has a high iron content of 57%, a silica content of 8-10%, a sulfur content of 0.15% and a phosphorus content of 0.15%.
It is a by-product of long-term weathering or natural enrichment of banded iron formations caused by metamorphism caused by quartz leaching and silicate decomposition. At least 26% iron may be found in lean iron ore.
The two primary morphological categories of rich iron ore deposits are flat rock masses and linear rock masses. Those that are flat are characterized as typical weathering shells, and below the sloping seams are banded iron formations in the form of enlarged ore bodies with a pocket-like base.
