The Waterbury Democrat., 1942-11-13
LIANT TO MAKE SPONGE lUON'
 GETS WPD 0. K.
ny ARTHUR & HEWITT (uMlled RrNas stan CaFreanAnaNntl !

tUnlted Froes Stan Cerresnandentl
 Cleveland, Nov is tUp)--An ais most revolutionary experiment ln modern steel industry practice has been given the go.ahead signal by the War Production Board, This means that Republica Steel Corp. soon will begin construction of a plant which win provide in part q substitute for the hleh.Rrade steel scrap essential to the production of electric furnace steel and which h now almost impossible Co get
 The plant, Go be constructed at Youngstown, O., will turn out the much mallgned sponge Iron" which unlike pig Iron, Is produced with. out tho enormous and expensive blast furnace,
 Authorization to construct the plant came from the Defense Plant Corp following the WIPES approval that had been delayed for months while other steelmakers called the plan 'unsound" and not likely to succeed.
 Although millions of dollars have been spent in seeking a meang to commerclallae the "steel without blast furnace" process. there is no secret behind Republicas venture It IS the almost age.oud formula for the production of sponge iron, the medieval mans iron making pro. cess, with modern trapplngs.
 Expect 2S,0Oo Tons a Year
 The plant is expected to cost about S450,o00 and take six months to build, ft will use high.grade magnetic ore from Republics mines in Northern New York State. cap- acity will be about loo tons of sponge iron day, but it is esti. mated that actual production prob. ably will average 25.0o0 tons year.
 There are thousand of ways of making sponge iron, and although the name Is descriptive of the orig inal product, the plant will turn out c finely powdered iron that will be rolled into briquetted sheets and then sent directly to the electric furnaces to be turned to steel.
 Opponents of sponge iron charge that even the product made from high-grade ore ends up with big percentage of impurities, but the Swedish industry turns out highly respected tool steels with the pro- cess. The limited amount of sponge iron used in America during peace time came from the Hoeanas mill in Sweden, mill that produces the real sponge" product with what it has available = a highgrade ore, a low-grade coal and only a medium clay.
 Republic finds itself with three conditions that make the plan feas- ible As an experiment to help re- lievw the serious scrap shortage that threatens to curtail its produce tion of steel for airplane engine parts propellers and bearings.
 fk has an electric furnace demand thA4 can't be met with existing scrap. 1t has a high-grade ore and a arplus of cooking gas from the Youngstown plant which. since the shift to wartime production, has no efficient use.
 10 Use Roasting Furnace
 The Swedish methods have proved too slow and Cumbersome, SO to speed things up. roasting furnace used by other industries for remov- ing sulphur from ores will be put to work with only slight modifica- tions. This process, of course, is to remove impurities from the ore l but without melting the metal as in the blast furnace.
 The actual steps in producing sponge iron have way of appear i ing simple on paper and so have misled many would-be second | Andrew Carnegie.
 The iron ore is first crushed into l fine powder ard the magnetic iron ovide is lifted out with mag net. leaving most of the impurities | bheind. Next. in the Republic pro- cess, after the iron is placed in | the roasting furnace, hydrogen is fed into the furnace. This combines ! with the oxygen in the iron evide | and shoots out the top as steam plain, ordinary H-2-O.
 The impurity -free metal is then ready for pressing into the bri- quetted sheets for charging the cleo tric furnaces in place of scrap.
 This iron is not readily adaptable | to use in the open hearths, where the bulk of the nations steel is made, but Republic feels that it will not oxydize or burn in the closely controlled electric furnaces. Thus, the controversial sponge iron is expected to help keep the air plane production lines rolling