Basic Oxygen Steelmaking - History

History

The basic oxygen process developed outside of traditional "big steel" environment. It was developed and refined by a single man, Swiss engineer Robert Durrer, and commercialized by two small steel companies in allied-occupied Austria, which had not yet recovered from the destruction of World War II.

In 1858, Henry Bessemer patented a steelmaking process involving oxygen blowing for decarburizing molten iron (UK Patent No. 2207). For nearly a hundred years commercial quantities of oxygen were not available at all or were too expensive, and the invention remained unused. During World War II German (C. V. Schwartz), Belgian (John Miles) and Swiss (Durrer and Heinrich Heilbrugge) engineers proposed their versions of oxygen-blown steelmaking, but only Durrer and Heilbrugge brought it to mass-scale production.

In 1943, Durrer, formerly a professor at the Berlin Institute of Technology, returned to Switzerland and accepted a seat on the board of Roll AG, the country's largest steel mill. In 1947 he purchased the first small 2.5-ton experimental converter from the U. S., and on April 3, 1948 the new converter produced its first steel. The new process could conveniently process large amounts of scrap metal with only a small proportion of primary metal necessary. In the summer of 1948 Roll AG and two Austrian state-owned companies, VOEST and ÖAMG, agreed to commercialize the Durrer process.

By June 1949, VOEST developed an adaptation of Durrer's process, the LD (Linz-Donawitz) process. In December 1949, VOEST and ÖAMG committed to building their first 30-ton oxygen converters. They were put into operation in November 1952 (VOEST in Linz) and May 1953 (ÖAMG, Donawitz) and temporarily became the leading edge of the world's steelmaking, causing a surge in steel-related research. Thirty-four thousand businesspeople and engineers visited the VOEST converter by 1963. The LD process reduced processing time and capital costs per ton of steel, contributing to the competitive advantage of Austrian steel. VOEST eventually acquired the rights to market the new technology. However, errors made by the VOEST and the ÖAMG management in licensing their technology made control over its adoption in Japan impossible and by the end of the 1950s the Austrians lost their competitive edge.

The original LD process consisted in blowing oxygen over the top of the molten iron through the water-cooled nozzle of a vertical lance. In the 1960s steelmakers introduced bottom-blown converters and introduced inert gas blowing for stirring the molten metal and removing the phosphorus impurities.

In the Soviet Union, some experimental production of steel using the process was done in 1934, but industrial use was hampered by lack of efficient technology to produce liquid oxygen. In 1939, the Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitsa perfected the design of centrifugal turboexpanders. The process was put to use in 1942-1944. Most turboexpanders in industrial use since then have been based on Kapitsa's design and centrifugal turboexpanders have taken over almost 100 percent of the industrial gas liquefaction and in particular the production of liquid oxygen for steelmaking.

The big American steelmakers did not catch up with the new technology; the first oxygen converters in the United States were launched at the end of 1954 by McLouth Steel in Trenton, Michigan, which accounted for less than 1 per cent of the national steel market. U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel introduced the oxygen process only in 1964. Elsewhere, owing to a licensing blunder on the part of the Austrians, the technology was adopted quickly. By 1970 half of world's and 80% of Japan's steel output was produced in oxygen converters. In the last quarter of the 20th century basic oxygen converters were gradually replaced by the electric arc furnace. In Japan the share of LD process decreased from 80% in 1970 to 70% in 2000; worldwide share of the basic oxygen process stabilized at 60%.