The process of ironmaking has relied for centuries on iron ore, an impure form of iron oxide, slowly being reduced to iron by carbon monoxide in a furnace. Whether that furnace is the charcoal fire of an Iron Age craftsman or a modern blast furnace, the fundamental process remains the same, even if the technology around it has been refined. Now details are emerging of a new take on iron smelting from China, which turns what has always been a slow and intensive process into one that only takes a few seconds. So-called flash ironmaking relies on the injection of a fine iron ore powder into a superheated furnace, with the reduction happening explosively and delivering a constant stream of molten iron.
Frustratingly there is little detail on how it works, with the primary source for the news coverage being a paywalled South China Morning Post article. The journal article alluded to has proved frustratingly difficult to find online, leaving us with a few questions as to how it all works. Is the reducing agent still carbon monoxide, for example, or do they use another one such as hydrogen? The interesting part from an economic perspective is that it’s said to work on lower-grade ores, opening up the prospect for the Chinese steelmakers relying less on imports. There’s no work though on how the process would deal with the inevitable slag such ore would create.
If any readers have journal access we’d be interested in some insight in the comments, and we’re sure this story will deliver fresh information over time. Having been part of building a blast furnace of our own in the past, it’s something we find interesting
Now you’ve sent me on a manhunt for information
Got as far as to find the edition of the journal, but no paper in sight
https://rudmet.ru/catalog/journal/2358/
Link below. Hope it helps. This was originally an idea from the U.S. but for some reason we never developed the technology further.
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4701/11/2/332?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Because it is more profitable in the short term to not invest in R and D, smelter upgrades, and finer pulverizers?
That’s a different paper by different authors, from 2021. A quick search found several articles on the subject on the same site, but none newer than 2021.
Still, they make for interesting reading:
https://www.mdpi.com/search?q=flash+ironmaking
Read about this and once finalised there shouldn’t be any need to ship ore outside of any country. Process all at home.
https://www.360doc.cn/article/52713072_1141955062.html
But the other articles here are better
From the linked article:
I wonder if this 1/3 improvement could bring them barely into a range where western steel industry is operating.
“Jane you’re an ignorant [slag]” is what Bill Murray said.
While the United States produced more steel than the rest of the world combined in 1950, since then things have accelerated. General Motors and US steel both went bankrupt.
We benefit greatly from China having the capacity for the best quality steel and products. We also benefit that they also are willing to manufacturer middle and low quality goods ordered by USA and other international businesses.
There is some really excellent metals manufacturing in the United States still. Some of it second to none and strategically not sourced anywhere else.
Still your unsupported claim about China is as ignorant as it is unhelpful. Understanding the global economy as it actually is — much better.
Thanks for reading.
I have to take issue with one of your comments – “We benefit greatly from China having the capacity for the best quality steel and products”. I spent 15 years (and 28 trips to countless Mills) going to China to help them improve their steel industry. They are improving their quality all the time but they do not make the highest quality steel. Also note that the air in many of the cities was almost unbreathable – my eyes stung and my nose ran constantly. It’s cheaper to make steel when you don’t have to worry about the environment and also when you steal technology from the West. That being said, they are trying hard to improve.
Never mind – Gilda Radner
I read 30% improvement in Energy efficiency.
The SNL quote is “Jane you ignorant slut” and it was Dan Aykroyd not Bill Murray: https://youtu.be/c91XUyg9iWM?si=TidX8arWS6fb6gyX
Details matter and you details about Chinese steel making appear similarly inaccurate.
L max, W China
No, that will only bring China from SIXTY SEVEN PCT of global seamless pipe market to maybe the “Middle Age” of 80+%. Good luck to WASPs and minions trying to recover from that
If the western steel industry was so efficient . . . then we wouldn’t be importing cheap steel from China as we’d be making cheap steel here. The Chinese government couldn’t subsidize their furnaces enough to make it economical if our practices weren’t, roughly, state of the art 75 years ago and kept mostly free of competition.
In the USA the EPA has no interest in efficiency. If they can see smoke they put an end to the manufacturing sector.
False, actual efficiency improvements are often ecologically better as well. This has more to do with markets and strategic policy than your conspiracy leads you to believe.
As the other person said but to take it even further. Efficiency is basically the goal of the epa. If you have am existing approved process that you can make more efficient they will absolutely love you. The problem is when you try and do things that are against the rules, or try to do things without asking them if you can do it so they can check if it is against the rules. People get so pissed when they have to jump through hoops for a harmless action, and never think about how if you didn’t have to jump through them, suddenly every action would call itself that harmless action.
Why would iron smelting research be published in a journal called “Nonferrous Metals”?
Wait, what journal was that room-temp superconductor of theirs published in
Perhaps the journal “Nefarious Metals”? ;)
I think because it’s a very close parallel to a method used for copper and nickel.
I was thinking the same. Flash reactors are not that new, and more or less common in non-ferrous cases. For a non ferrous guy, iron is just another metal. Maybe they assumed they were getting a better and more constructive feedback.
I assume is meant to be “no WORD though…”
I’m not convinced from the very limited description this really is that novel or effective really – powdering everything fine enough to make the final processing step rapid takes time and energy, which might make the process rate actually more than than the conventional methods. Really hope some real details come out and this is something really interesting, even if its just a process that scales down better for a more on demand or local processing that would be kind of neat.
Maybe some of the grinding/powdering could be moved along the ore mining/transport line.
As in while mining making the chunks smaller from the start and between every conveyor belt jump/step is another crusher.
Doing it somewhere else doesn’t really change the fact you still have to do it.
You could, but fine powders tend to be annoying to load and unload. They get airborne, into your lungs, etc
I don’t know anything about iron ore smelting, but a process that generates a continuous stream of molten iron might have advantages over large blast furnaces that process a load at a time.
One might imagine the equivalent of a 3d printer. Not an actual 3d printer, but a construction at the foundry that pours molten iron over an embedded pattern in the sand. It doesn’t take much imagination to construct a scenario where a continuous stream poured over a large mold is superior to a huge flask.
Improvements in process are oftentimes not based on efficiency. For example, a nitrogen fixation plant has to be huge for efficiency – the size of a small city – and uses an enormous amount of energy (5% of the world’s energy production). A process that was even less efficient but was much smaller would be highly useful, we could distribute production and make use of stranded energy generation.
I’m also wondering if the stream could be tuned by adding/mixing other elements dynamically. Add Chromium to generate stainless steel, but dynamically while the molten metal is being poured. This could create a piece that was stainless steel in certain sections and carbon steel in others, seamlessly transforming from one to the other. This might result in novel constructions that are difficult to do with large batch-load pours.
Blast furnaces do produce a relatively steady stream of liquid iron. Ore and coke goes in the top layer by layer as the layers travel downwards. They can run continuously for several years.
To your last point, there aren’t many downstream customers who want contaminated products, which a mixed material would certainly be considered by many, but given the small effective melt size, you might be able to create a smelter/foundry hybrid plant where you create a cast product with custom metallurgy in different parts of the casting. I’m just not sure how you control composition and mixing of alloying element in an “explosive” smelting process. Plus smelting has significant slag, you need to deal with that.
No, there is already a bunch of fines that result in the standard ore collection and processing steps. As it is now, they need to collect that and send it to another factory for ‘pelletizing’ to use in the standard furnaces. This would allow skipping that step and using all the fines in this process while the larger chunks go through standard refining. I imagine that this is where that 30 percent comes from at least in large part.
From the webpage:
After more than a decade of intensive research in China, a new ironmaking technology is poised to revolutionise the global steel manufacturing industry.
The method involves injecting finely ground iron ore powder into an extremely hot furnace, triggering an “explosive chemical reaction”, according to the engineers involved in the project.
The result is a display of bright red, glowing liquid iron droplets that rain down and collect at the bottom of the furnace, forming a stream of high-purity iron that can be directly used for casting or “one-step steelmaking”.
Known as flash ironmaking, the method “can complete the ironmaking process in just three to six seconds, compared to the five to six hours required by traditional blast furnaces”, wrote the project team led by Professor Zhang Wenhai, an academician of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Engineering, in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nonferrous Metals in November.
This equates to a 3,600-fold or more increase in the speed of ironmaking. The new method also works exceptionally well for low or medium-yield ores that are abundant in China, according to the researchers.
Existing iron production methods depend heavily on high-yield ores, and China spends a huge amount of money importing these ores from Australia, Brazil and Africa.
According to calculations by Zhang and his colleagues, the new technology could improve the energy use efficiency of China’s steel industry by more than one-third. As it eliminates the need for coal entirely, it would also enable the steel industry to achieve the coveted goal of “near-zero carbon dioxide emissions”, Zhang’s team added.
It’s on many other news sites, so not really paywalled anymore
Sound a bit like thermite:
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite :
The most common composition is iron thermite. The oxidizer used is usually either iron(III) oxide or iron(II,III) oxide. The former produces more heat. The latter is easier to ignite, likely due to the crystal structure of the oxide. Addition of copper or manganese oxides can significantly improve the ease of ignition. The density of prepared thermite is often as low as 0.7 g/cm3. This, in turn, results in relatively poor energy density (about 3 kJ/cm3), rapid burn times, and spray of molten iron due to the expansion of trapped air.
Yah, came to say the same. Sounds like they re-invented thermite.
Thermite uses aluminum to react with the iron oxide and produces aluminum oxide as the biproduct to elemental iron. From what I can discern, they are injecting oxygen and natural gas into a chamber along with the powdered ore and yielding iron and water/co2 as the biproduct. With all other impurities as the slag. Its not entirely dissimilar to containing a rocket exhaust inside a vaccuum chamber. Check out the images in the study by out of the University of Utah, they are very informative.
Not a word about worker safety. What can go wrong blasting iron ore in a superhot furnace to get an explosive reaction?
Anyway, another small detail with big implications is that there is a ‘flow’ of iron instead of a ‘pool’ or iron. Unless the flow is of the same order of magnitude as the flow when you’re tipping a crucible full of molten metal into a mold, I’d say that the end product is not going to be of the same quality as when using the conventional way.
Of course it can probably used quite well for smaller things. And I do guess that it’s easier to downscale a furnace like this.
It’s challenging to talk about worker safety in the context other than a particular installation. Smelting processes aren’t generally comfortable for the human workforce and should be observed from a control room, preferably on screen.
About that Chinese mysterious process, I think it’s something similar to thermite welding but continuous and at the larger scale. Molten iron is drained at the same rate as thermite mix supplied. It is possible, that all the compounds are injected into the smelting chamber separately. Some kind of closed loop of burning fumes could provide an opportunity to get rid of unwanted byproducts and supply fresh ingredients.
That “three to six seconds, compared to the five or six hours…” and “3,600-fold or more increase” sound like advertising nonsense. It may take just three to six seconds for the powdered ore to be reduced to iron…but how much iron do you get in three to six seconds? Multiply that by 3600 for a proper comparison to a quite-large blast furnace.
Add in the preprocessing, grinding the ore very fine, plus the use of H2 and CH4 that are rather more expensive per kilo than coal, and you’ve got something that sounds great but is of largely academic interest at this time.
advertising nonsense indeed, some journalist with the attention span of a mosquito jumps to a conclusion by dividing two numbers, oblivious to stoichiometry or powder handling dynamics. It does indeed sound like thermite but with a lower cost reductant than aluminium powder!
Could it be something like aerosolizing the powdered ore and igniting it maybe with some oxidized or even just in air with high 02 concentration. If so maybe it works on a similar principle to rain droplets forming from the separated iron. I dunno
A one month subscription to the SCMP is US$6.
You guys really spare no expense to bring us the news, eh?
This would gain you absolutely nothing, because the SCMP does not tell the name or DOI of the original paper. And the website says it’s $11 for one month access (at least on my end).
It’s really sad that none of the news outlets bothered to find the original paper to take a look at it or to put a link to it.
This would gain you absolutely nothing, because the SCMP does not tell the name or DOI of the original paper. And the website says it’s $11 for one month access (at least on my end).
It’s really sad that none of the news outlets bothered to find the original paper to take a look at it or to put a link to it.
This sounds very similar to something done over at the University of Utah
https://www.energy.gov/eere/amo/articles/novel-flash-ironmaking-process
LOL surprise surprise. China comes up with another novel technology that was created somewhere else first.
I do somewhat think that their intellectual property sharing they require when trying to sell in China actually hurts their innovation. Why come up with your own methods when you can access everyone elses.
If details are sparse then either a) It’s really good and they are really good at keeping it secret so they can make money off of it, or more likely b) It has all kinds of problems and issues and doesn’t really work like they claim.
The devil is in the details.
China has never in all of history used state run media to prop up research which had fundamental flaws but surface level sounds good. That has never happened nope not ever. 1989 is also just a random number.
reducing gases are H2 and CH4. here’s a ppt presentation from the US version of the effort led by Univ of Utah: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/12/f34/fcto_h2atscale_workshop_sohn.pdf
If it’s so good a process, and the paper is from 2016, why isn’t everybody using this process?
you sire win for me. thanks for the link.
yep – hydrogen or methane – that paper 2011. Check out the NPV’s – to
be viable it needs a carbon credit system, like everything else the WEF touches!
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/12/f34/fcto_h2atscale_workshop_sohn.pdf
No. For the hydrogen version to be financially viable it needs carbon credits. Because natural gas would be more efficient, and thus cheaper. The only reason to use hydrogen would be with carbon credits making it cheaper. Which is a good idea, as we need to limit carbon. Or are you one of those people with your head in the sand?
Seems like it is H2 or CH4 not and. But the coolest part in that ppt was the integration into directly making steel from the molten iron stream. Kinda wild.
Apparently this is the original paper: http://ysyl.bgrimm.cn/ysjsylbfen/ch/reader/view_abstract.aspx?file_no=YSYL202400418&flag=1
DOI: http://www.doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1007-7545.2024.11.003
the earliest work I’ve found is from Univ of Utah… here is an article from 2013: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11663-012-9754-z
(but it clearly references earlier work from all over the world)
this is something that many groups have been pursuing for awhile – and there has been lots of good progress made. here is an article from the Utah group from back in 2013 but it references several earlier papers from research groups around the world (and that’s just academic groups, to say nothing of steel companies themselves who might not publish in these journals). Anyway, here’s the paper reference: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11663-012-9754-z
How did you find this?
I googled “Zhang Wenhai flash furnace” and after three or four pages of the same news text, this website popped up.
Most other searches were unsuccessful, such as “Zhang Wenhai Nonferrous metals” or “Zhang Wenhai Chinese Academy of Engineering”. The latter is where the author allegedly works, but the paper says “China Nerin Engineering Co.Ltd.”, which is not mentioned by the article.
The process is generically called flash ironmaking – just google around for that. you’d need a way to access journal articles to read the full papers.
Quality of the grain should be interesting.
Wow thank you for finding it! Crazy not a single one of the journalists writing the same wall of text over and over again even bothered to search for it ..
That’s it. Good job.
Research Progress of Flash Ironmaking Technology
ZHANG Renjie, ZHANG Wenhai
(China Nerin Engineering Co., Ltd., Nanchang 330000, China)
Abstract: “Flash ironmaking” is a non-blast furnace ironmaking process and engineering technology based on the cross-disciplinary integration, which extends the mature flash smelting process of non-ferrous metallurgical industry to ironmaking. Its goal is to achieve near-zero carbon ironmaking with low energy consumption, low investment and large scale. In this paper, the laboratory and pilot test results of flash ironmaking technology (flash iron for short) were summarized, and the future industrialization of this technology was evaluated. The results show that the flash iron can efficiently treat low-grade complex ore, cancel the raw material pretreatment section such as pellet sintering, spheroidization and coking, achieve zero carbon emission, easy to scale, and realize one-step steelmaking. The comprehensive energy consumption (351 kgce per ton steel) of flash iron is less than that of the blast furnace ironmaking process (553 kgce per ton iron)
Speaking of. My favorite steel manufacturer, CPM Crucible Industries, originally founded in 1870, is likely to go bankrupt within weeks. It’s a US steel manufacturer known around the world for it’s high end steels used in pocket knives, survival knives, multi tools, kitchen knives, tooling. It’s used in the new Leatherman ARC and thousands of other types. I have quite a few lengths of different CPM steels in stock at home. It would be a giant setback for high end steel technology, if they goes out of business.
There’s a book coming out on the subject: https://www.routledge.com/Flash-Ironmaking/Sohn/p/book/9781032378381
China is famous for producing inferior products so i would not take this new method for granted and wait & see how the end result turns out
The devil is again in the details. Grinding ore into a “fine powder” small enough to be blasted in a jet takes very large amounts of energy with ball and bar mills running for days and weeks on end.
No, they use the fines already produced in the standard or collection and processing methods. Leave the large chunks for the blast furnaces. As it is now those existing fines need to go to another factory to be palletized or sintered to make them usable, this would skip that step. Likely where the energy savings claims come from largely.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Especially when it’s related to China.
Until they build a factory I am dubious.
” the primary source for the news coverage being a paywalled South China Morning Post article. The journal article alluded to has proved frustratingly difficult to find online”
Thanks for the giggle.
Come on you can surely see what I can see?
The advantage here is that you can use fines directly without sintering, saving about $12/t bypassing the sinter plant. Nothing to sneeze at when ore is $110/t. Nobody will grind valuable lump ore for this process.
I assume this all has to be done under a reducing atmosphere and kept at least inert until things cool down. More surface area means more oxidation.
So, reading through the comments- the general feeling seems to be “China’s never invented anything”, “The quality of their steel is poor”, and “Maybe that brings them up to almost where the West operates”. Maybe all that’s true, or partly true, or just cynical xenophobia. BUT, any improvement for their processes- lower energy use, lower carbon emissions- the whole planet benefits from that. So I hope it’s a process revolution that flows through their system like tsunami. (I agree it’s more likely than not just PR/BS, but still hoping it’s more.)
Why call it a Chinese process when it was well in development in 2016 in the US, and is a fork of a copper smelting process developed in Finland in the 1940s?
or maybe there are shenanigans going on and there’s nothing to see here?
Ukraine’s steel industry is destroyed, and the US steel industry has been dismantled. This might be a good way to restart both, since there is minimal existing equipment to pay for.
BTW the process was first theorized in the US, but perfected in China. This underscores the value of making what you use, rather than farming it out. When you make it, you own the value chain.
Except it hasn’t been perfected. The way the story reads is similar to so very many technology announcements that are at research/pilot stage and ready to scale up. If I had a dollar for every story about the “next big thing” that I have read over the last 40 years working in research, I could buy a Lamborghini. Methanol fuel cells for our laptops? Purifying silicon for chips by heating small granules making impurities migrate to the surface that can be removed by tumbling? Cellulosic ethanol? Still waiting.
In the world of R&D, the scale-up of technology is called the Valley of Death. This one is promising, and if they make it work, good for them. But at this point, it’s hype, until they get a factory producing product that returns enough to offset the investment.
energy is energy is energy.
Show me without a doubt that this method is truly less energy intensive. How much energy is consumed preparing the ore for the process? What is the energy needed for any other materials that are used? How much hotter does the process need to be? How do we generate that amount of energy?
Now take those values and show me that this makes sense.
We’ve been doing it the way we’ve been doing it for centuries because it works efficiently. I don’t hold high hopes that this method is really efficient or effective. Just different and a chance for a “new shiny” idea to capture the headlines.
The main reason for these direct smelting processes being energy efficient than a blast furnace is that you don’t need to reduce coal to coke.
energy is energy is energy.
Show me without a doubt that this method is truly less energy intensive. How much energy is consumed preparing the ore for the process? What is the energy needed for any other materials that are used? How much hotter does the process need to be? How do we generate that amount of energy?
Now take those values and show me that this makes sense.
We’ve been doing it the way we’ve been doing it for centuries because it works efficiently. I don’t hold high hopes that this method is really efficient or effective. Just different and a chance for a “new shiny” idea to capture the headlines.
Hiyall ! Thanks to the best ever browser extension, “Bypass Paywalls Clean” (BPC) i’ve ever installed on Waterfox (a lean, deadvertized and faster fork of the original Firefox) i have found the original paper published in the SCMP and could read it integrally. I made a PDF file out of it, but can’t find a way to put it here, unfortunately…. The extension isn’t on the Firefox extensions list anymore, i guess for copyright issues due to its very nature and object — bypass paywalls..;-) — but you can find it on Github, right here : https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean. The installing process is quite easy (repack it in an appropriate format) and works very well, thanks to its author’s meticulosity. Best regards to you all !-)
Just realized i forgot the link to the original SCMP paper, so here it is…
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3289441/chinas-explosive-ironmaking-breakthrough-achieves-3600-fold-productivity-boost
Evidently no one remembers the Great Leap Forward.
Remembering that one is illegal. :-)
Apparently a Hydrogen plant is being built close to a now defunct Steel Manufacturing plant in South Australia .. wouldn’t it be great if this Technology saved its Ass (Gena)
Sounds like HIsmelt – iron making process originating from Germany in the 1980’s, developed toward commercial scale in Australia by Rio Tinto (before the GFC hit), now owned by the Chinese. HIsmelt was/is a bath smelting process – this could be something different maybe based on Outukumpu flash smelting technology.
And our government will pay foreign companies to build chip plants here but will not give US Steel companies a nickel to develop something like this
… They pretty much universally expressed zero interest in developing “something like this” ever since flash ironmaking first became a thing ~17 years ago. You can’t subsidize development of something when no one wants to work on it.
Also, U.S. Steel has received billions in annual subsidies over the years, in addition to import protections and tariffs on the majority of foreign steel. It didn’t drive development, but rather stagnation.
p.s. I used to be a steel buyer.. Y’all have some interesting ideas considering you’ve probably never even heard of lab test results for various steels, let alone see one or could understand the significance. Did someone say WASPaloy? Lol..
Sounds like they just inject pressurized iron powder in the oven, allowing it to ignite, melt and sink to the bottom of the furnace, then leaking out a small channel on the bottom.
Need to see the energy balance. With the temperatures needed to reduce / melt the ore, there will be a lot of wasted energy. The beauty of a blast furnace it captures all of the thermal energy in the stack.
However not needing Coke is a nice feature.
I worked on this technology 20 years ago on a project called HiSmelt in Perth Western Australia. The project was part funded by Rio Tinto and the technology was intended to be sold to the Chinese steel makers. Plant achieved 80% nameplate capacity, before being shut down due to lack interest from the Chinese steel making industry.