As ironmakers are well aware, it was only a few decades ago that the blast furnace was viewed as a strange 'black box'. Recently, however, various in-furnace phenomena have become the subject of serious scientific study, largely as the result of the 'dissection' of dead furnaces, together with the development of advanced monitoring and control techniques. In this way, a new frontier has been opened within the venerable domain of metallurgy. In the light of these new developments, the Committee on Reaction within Blast Furnaces was set up in March 1977 by the Joint Society ofIron and Steel Basic Research - a cooperative research organization of the Iron and Steel Institute of Japan (ISIJ), the Japan Institute of Metals (JIM) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Consisting of twenty-six members and advisors drawn from the fields of academia and industry, this committee collected, discussed, and evaluated numerous papers during its five year commission. Particular attention was paid to the interpretation of findings drawn from the autopsy of dead furnaces, in the context of the live furnace state, and the correlation of data regarding cohesive zone configuration, level, and furnace performance. The results of this intense research activity are presented here in the hope that they will serve not only as a source of enrichment to the professional knowledge of researchers and operators, but also as textual material for graduate students in the field of metallurgy.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

Excerpt from Studies of Blast Furnace Phenomena Still, the other question debated, be it borne in mind, is the economy of fuel in furnaces, whether charged into the furnace and consumed there, or supplied from without as caloric in the heated blast. Again, it is only when furnaces are working with the same, or nearly the same, charges of ore, flux, and fuel, i. E., same quality of raw materials, and yielding the same quality of iron, that we can get comparative results Of a reliable nature. Furnaces may be work ing in one district as well as in another, although using very different quantities of ore and fuel, and yielding very different quantities of iron, and Showing very different profit and loss accounts. Pig-iron making, like other manufactures, must be looked at both from the purely technical and the economical point of view. There is a technical maximum Of useful effect and an economical maximum of useful effect. The technical useful effect would be so much the greater as the yield of pig-iron from a given weight Of carbon and ores of the poorer qualities is greater. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.