A steel mill or steelworks is an industrial plant for the manufacture of steel.
Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. It is produced in a two-stage process. First, iron ore is reduced or smelted with coke and limestone in a blast furnace, producing molten iron which is either cast into pig iron or carried to the next stage as molten iron. In the second stage, known as steelmaking, impurities such as sulfur, phosphorus, and excess carbon are removed and alloying elements such as manganese, nickel, chromium and vanadium are added to produce the exact steel required. Steel mills then turn molten steel into blooms, ingots, slabs and sheet through casting, hot rolling and cold rolling.
In the late 19th Century and early 20th Century the world's largest steel mill was the Barrow Hematite Steel Company steelworks located in Barrow-in-Furness, United Kingdom. Today, the world's largest steel mill is in Gwangyang, South Korea.
Read more about Steel Mill: Integrated Mill, Minimill
Famous quotes containing the words steel mill, steel and/or mill:
“It is not as easy to emigrate with steel mills as it is with the manuscript of a novel.”
—Golo Mann (b. 1909)
“Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff of any degree of fineness; but nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat- flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)