ABSTRACT
The steel industry can be broadly classified into two categories, integrated steel plants and mini mills. The hot metal produced in conventional blast furnaces is predominantly used for oxygen steelmaking in integrated plants, and the route is well established. A typical steelmaking process route is based on Smelting Reduction (SR) (COREX) hot metal–oxygen converter (LD) — secondary metallurgy (SM) — continuous casting (CC). Although the shell diameter for a given furnace is chosen largely on the basis of the tap weight required and the steelmaking practice to be adopted, the modern trend is to select a larger shell diameter in proportion to the tap weight. Although the traditional raw material used in electric steelmaking is scrap, shortages of good quality scrap have caused steelmakers to consider other sources of iron units. Simultaneously, the development of direct reduction processes has resulted in Direct reduced iron (DRI) being used in electric arc furnace steelmaking.
