Steel
Steel is an alloy made up of iron with typically a few tenths of a percent of carbon to improve its strength and fracture resistance compared to other forms of iron. Many other elements may be present or added. Because of its high tensile strength and low cost, steel is used in buildings, infrastructure, tools, ships, trains, cars, machines, electrical appliances, weapons, and rockets. Iron is the base metal of steel.
The interaction of the allotropes of iron with the alloying elements, primarily carbon, gives steel and cast iron their range of unique properties. In pure iron, the crystal structure has relatively little resistance to the iron atoms slipping past one another, and so pure iron is quite ductile, or soft and easily formed. Steel is currently one of the most commonly manufactured materials in the world.
Production
There are hundreds of grades of Steel each with different properties. Common variants are Stainless Steel, Spring Steel, Tool Steel and Mild Steel.
Mild Steel
Mild Steel is a low-carbon steel that is used in construction and is easy to manipulate due to its flexibility.
To produce it, Iron Ore is added to a Blast Furnace along with Coke and Lime. The Blast Furnace is heated until the mixture begins melting. The Coke is pure carbon and reacts with Iron Oxide to form Iron and Carbon Dioxide. The Lime's purpose is to react with impurities and create "slag" which floats to the top of the molten ore. In industry this process is in constant motion and Iron mixed with excess carbon will sink to the bottom where it is piped off for further processing.
The product from the blast furnace is called Cast Iron or Pig Iron and is generally unusable due to the high carbon content inside it, which makes it very brittle.
To remove this carbon, molten Cast Iron has Oxygen blasted through it which combines with the excess Carbon to create CO2 which escapes through the top of the molten mass. This leaves the Iron with almost zero carbon content, at which point an exact quantity of carbon can added to create the grade of Steel that is needed.
Uses
- See also: Spear
Steel can be used as a crafting material for a spear's head.
Dependencies
See also
References
| This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Steel, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors). | 
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