Faster & Cheaper

A sunlike ball of flame burst last week from a new cylindrical furnace in the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. works at Aliquippa, Pa. For half an hour it bathed an area 200 yds. around with white light. Then a shower of sparks sprayed from the furnace, and the light gradually subsided. Inside the furnace--where just 37 minutes ago there was only molten iron, scrap and slag-forming materials--there now bubbled 54 tons of high-purity steel.

So did the "basic oxygen" process of steelmaking go to work for a major U.S. producer, drastically cutting the time needed to make steel from the eight to twelve hours required by an average open-hearth furnace. The new process: a jet of oxygen is fired into the molten bath of raw materials; this sets off the display of flame and drives off such impurities as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur. The process not only makes steel of comparable quality to that made in open-hearth operations but does it much faster and cheaper. J. & L. figures that its two new furnaces represent an investment of only $15 per annual ingot ton v. at least $40 for new open-hearth facilities.

Developed in Austria, the basic oxygen process came to the U.S. in 1954, when McLouth Steel Corp. installed a small furnace at Trenton, Mich. Jones & Laughlin is the first integrated producer to use it, but other companies will soon follow. Kaiser Steel Corp. is installing three such furnaces in its plant at Fontana, Calif.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.