| Pig Iron |
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Pig iron is raw Iron , the immediate product of Smelting Iron Ore with Coke and Limestone in a Blast Furnace . Pig iron has a very high Carbon content, typically 3.5%, which makes it very Brittle and not useful directly as a material except for limited applications. Pig iron is typically poured directly out of the bottom of the blast furnace through a Trough into a ladle car for transfer to the steel plant in liquid form, referred to as "hot metal." The hot metal is then charged into a Steel-making vessel to produce Steel , typically with an Electric Arc Furnace or Basic Oxygen Furnace , by burning off the excess carbon in a controlled fashion and adjusting the Alloy composition. Earlier processes for this included the Bessemer Process , Open Hearth Furnace , Finery Forge , and the Puddling Furnace . The traditional shape of the molds used for these ingots was a branching structure formed in Sand , with many individual ingots at right angles to a central channel or ''runner.'' Such a configuration is similar in appearance to a litter of Piglet s suckling on a sow. When the metal had cooled and hardened, the smaller ingots (the ''pigs'') were simply broken from the much thinner runner (the ''sow''), hence the name ''pig iron''. As pig iron is intended for remelting, the uneven size of the ingots and inclusion of small amounts of sand was insignificant compared to the ease of casting and of handling. Modern Steel Mill s and direct-reduction iron plants transfer the molten iron to a Ladle for immediate use in the steel making furnaces or cast it into pigs on a pig casting machine for reuse or resale. Modern pig casting machines produce stick pigs, which break into smaller 4-10 kg pieces at discharge. process of smelting Iron Ore to make Wrought Iron from pig iron, the right half of the illustration (not shown) displays men working a Blast Furnace , ''Tiangong Kaiwu'' Encyclopedia published in 1637, written by Song Yingxing ( 1587 - 1666 ).]] Cast Iron is made by remelting pig iron, often along with substantial quantities of Scrap iron, and removing undesirable contaminants, adding alloys, and adjusting the carbon content. The Chinese were making pig iron by the later Zhou Dynasty (1122 BC - 256 BC) . In Europe , the process did not become common until the 14th Century . POPULAR REFERENCES
In the 1977 Clint Eastwood movie "The Gauntlet", Pat Hingle refers to the armour Eastwood has attached to a bus as pig iron. EUROPEAN PRODUCERS OF PIG IRON SEE ALSO
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