Copper smelting

Smelting is the process of applying heat to ore in order to extract a base metal. In the case of copper, combining tin and/or arsenic in the right proportions produces bronze, an alloy that is significantly harder than copper.

Process

Normally, a natural draft furnace using wood, a kiln, can up to 1400 Celsius degrees (or 2552 Fahrenheit), while a furnace that uses fuel such as charcol can reach temperatures up to 1600 °C degrees.

See also

• Bloomery Furnace

External links

• Prehistoric copper smelting in a pit!, ancient1580, 25 May 2012, YouTube

References

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Smelting, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).