Puddling is the metallurgical process of converting cast iron into soft, low-carbon iron . The essence of the process is to melt cast iron in a special furnace without contact with the fuel and mix the molten metal with special rods on which particles of molten iron adhere, gradually forming a dough - like mass weighing up to 40-60 kg. At the exit of the pudding furnace, the resulting cricket is forged and sent for conditioning. Pudding iron is well welded, has high ductility, contains few impurities ( phosphorus , sulfur , non-metallic inclusions).
Pudding is an outdated method for producing iron; it has been supplanted by more advanced processes - Bessemer , Thomas and Open-hearth , and subsequently by electric melting .
Pudding is one of the most physically difficult ways to get steel . The puddlers worked in difficult conditions, mixing a mixture of molten metal and slag with a metal bar. With stirring, metal adhered to the rod, and the melt became more viscous. At the final stage of the process, the long-crowbar puddlers broke the heavy dough-like mass into several pieces, then fused them in the furnace and repeated the process several times. For a 12-hour shift, puddlers made up to 9 swimming trunks.
History
For the first time, the idea of mixing molten iron with blowing it with air appeared in the Chinese treatise " Hainan-chi ", dated 122 BC
The pudding process was developed in the second half of the 18th century by the English metallurgist Henry Cort , who received a patent in 1784. Almost a hundred years after this, before the emergence of more advanced processes, pudding remained the main way of processing cast iron into steel, and came to naught a few decades after their appearance. In the novel by Jules Verne Five Hundred Million Begumas (1879), the practice of pudding is recorded in the steel city of Stalstadt.
In the USSR, pudding was used until the 1930s.
Literature
- RA Mott, 'Dry and Wet Puddling' Trans. Newcomen Soc. 49 (1977-8), 153-8.
- RA Mott (ed. P. Singer), Henry Cort: the great finer (The Metals Society, London 1983).
- K. Barraclough, Steelmaking: 1850-1900 (Institute of Materials, London 1990), 27-35.
- Fredrick Overman The Manufacture of Iron, in All Its Various Branches . - Philadelphia: HC Baird, 1854. - P. 259-302.
Links
Pudding // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.