Does anyone know the ratio of tons of ore to tons of coal for a smelter?
I’ve got a branch to a (off-layout) 1950s era lead zinc smelter and am trying to determine how many carloads of ore to a carload of metalurgical coal.
Grinnell
A quick google search yielded THIS info on smelting copper. If you scroll down to page 151, you’ll see that the equation is in Btus/ton. I didn’t read it all, but there appears to be some peripheral reference to other minerals, too.
THIS LINK deals with lead, although there appears to be less data and less detail shown.
If you’d prefer to google it yourself, this is the terminology which I used:
- amount of coal required to smelt one ton of lead ore
- Wayne
Well DUH. Google of course [:$]
Thanks Dr. Wayne. First shot out of the barrel with your suggested search; “amount of coal required to smelt one ton of lead ore” , yielded: " lead ore …one-half tons of fuel are required, upon the average, to smelt one ton of the ore" from the Kansas Geological Survey.
Now that I think about it, the answer probably depends significantly on how “rich” the ore is.
OK, the reference was from the 1898 in Kansas (not ore from Idaho), but now I have a ‘ballpark estimate’, so I’ll schedule 4 cars of coal for my eight cars of ore.
Grinnell
Not an expert on smelting but metalurgical coal is probably an overkill. I would expect bituminous to be adequate.
If your ore arrives in 70 ton capacity ore cars, you’ll need to compensate for the capacity of your coal hoppers. 36 foot two-bays were typically 50 ton cars, so you’d need six to have enough fuel.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with collieries, but no smelters)