I am building a modern day Electric Arc Furnace and I wanted to know what is a sinter plant? Is it attached to the plant and does it need rail access?
Google is your friend. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinter_Plant
Pete
You wouldn’t need to a sintering plant for an EAF. They process low grade ores and some materials left over from the steel making process. EAFs don’t use ore.
They’re not attached to mills and are considerable facilities on their own.
Go to pennpilot.psu.edu. Search for Saxonburg PA. Pan southwest a couple miles until you find the intersection of 228 and Victory Rd. Set the era to 1957-1962, then click the red push pin. See that massive plant and enormous yard (and the huge fields of unprocessed ore)? That’s where USS sintered ore for the Pittsburgh mills. Note than its close to 30 miles from the USS mills in Pittsburgh.
thank you for the help and information. i do have a quarry and scrap that will supply the mill with steel and other products that will go into making new steel beams and or products.
thank you for your advice and input, but that’s the reason i made this post because i read that page over constantly and looked at diagrams and couldn’t understand it no matter how hard i read it.
Sintering is a process that is used to form larger pieces of iron (or steel) into larger usable pieces that can be, as the wiki page mentioned, used in blast furnaces. It can also be used to forn metal parts for manufacturing operations. Some hand tools are made using this process. Old bluebox athearn engine wheels were made with this process.
I didn’t know about that and I thank you for your comments and supplying information that i didn’t know about. till now.
If you live where there’s a real winter, you know what a snowball is. A frozen snowball is very similar in concept to fired sinter at a steel mill.
Blast furnaces work by blowing hot air through the charge to oxidize the coke and reduce the iron oxide in the feed to metallic iron. Very fine feed will plug up a blast furnace so air can’t move through it.
Sintering takes a mix of fine iron ore, fine coke, and fine limestone that can’t be fed directly to the furnace and heats the mixture up to near melting temperature. This causes the particles to fuse together much like a snowball fuses near melting snow crystals together. This mixture then cools, resulting in sinter.
Sinter is by definition used in blast furnaces and has no use in an electric arc furnace.
Before iron ore pellets became common, sintering was used to process fine ore so it could be fed into a blast furnace. This is stll being done overseas.
Now, most sinter plants in the USA are the “garbage disposal” for the steel mill processing pellet fines, dust, and mill scale into blast furnace feed.
If the sinter plant is an independent operation, rail will be needed to bring raw materials in and sinter out. One at an integrated steel mill, like at Mittal’s Burns Harbor, needs no direct rail service.