Description: The essential journey begins with the extraction of iron ore, the primary raw material for steelmaking. This ore is mined from open-pit or underground deposits.
Iron ore undergoes reduction to produce sponge iron (also known as direct reduced iron or DRI). This process bypasses the traditional blast furnace step, offering potential environmental benefits in some methods, including lower carbon emissions.
Sponge iron or a combination of sponge iron and scrap metal is melted in an industrial furnace, typically an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) or a Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF). These furnaces operate at extremely high temperatures to transform raw materials into molten steel.
The molten steel undergoes a process called continuous casting, where it is poured into molds that shape it into billets. These billets are long blocks of steel with a square or rectangular cross-section, ready for further processing.
Billets are reheated to high temperatures and passed through a series of rollers in a rolling mill. These rollers progressively reduce the size of the billets and shape them into the desired final dimensions of a TMT bar.
