Pig iron

Pig iron in the Herrenwyk Industrial Museum History Workshop, Lübeck, Germany

Pig iron is an intermediate product of the iron industry in the production of steel which is obtained by smelting iron ore in a blast furnace. Pig iron has a very high carbon content, which makes it very brittle and not useful directly as a material except for limited applications. The traditional shape of the molds used for pig iron ingots is a branching structure formed in sand, with many individual ingots at right angles to a central channel or "runner", resembling a litter of piglets being nursed by a sow. When the metal had cooled and hardened, the smaller ingots (the "pigs") were simply broken from the runner (the "sow"), hence the name "pig iron".

Dependencies

• Iron ore
• Steel
  • Carbon
  • Pig iron

See also

• Iron ore
• Sponge iron
• Steel
• Wrought iron

References

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