AISI letter prefixes refer to the process used in steel making which affect the

properties of the steel products. (B) Acid Bessemer Carbon Steel, (C) Basic
Open Hearth Steel, (D) Acid Open Hearth Steel, (E) Electric Furnace Alloy
Steel.

Steel Making

Open-hearth process, also called Siemens-martin Process, steelmaking technique

that for most of the 20th century accounted for the major part of all steel made in the world.
William Siemens, a German living in England in the 1860s, seeking a means of increasing
the temperature in a metallurgical furnace, resurrected an old proposal for using the waste
heat given off by the furnace; directing the fumes from the furnace through a brick
checkerwork, he heated the brick to a high temperature, then used the same pathway for
the introduction of air into the furnace; the preheated air materially increased the flame
temperature.

Blister Steel
In order to convert wrought iron into steelthat is, increase the carbon contenta
carburization process was used. Iron billets were heated with charcoal in sealed clay pots
that were placed in large bottle-shaped kilns holding about 10 to 14 tons of metal and about
2 tons of charcoal. When the kiln was heated, carbon from the charcoal diffused into the
iron.

Crucible steel Technique for producing fine or tool steel.

The earliest known use of the technique occurred in India and central Asia in the early 1st
millennium.
The steel was produced by heating wrought iron with materials rich in carbon, such as
charcoal in closed vessels. It was known as wootz and later as Damascus steel.
The crucible process appeared in northern Europelikely as a result of trade contact with
the Middle Eastwhere it was used to make the high-quality Ulfbehrt swords used by
theVikings. The process was devised again in Britain about 1740 by Benjamin

Huntsman, who established a steelworks at Sheffield, Eng., where the steel was made by
melting blister steel in clay crucibles at a temperature of 1,500 to 1,600 C (2,700 to
2,900 F), using coke as a fuel. Originally, the charge in the crucible weighed about 6
kilograms, but by 1870 it had increased to 30 kilograms.

Electric furnace

Heating chamber with electricity as the heat source for achieving very high temperatures to
melt and alloy metals and refractories. The electricity has no electrochemical effect on the
metal but simply heats it.
Modern electric furnaces generally are either arc furnaces or induction furnaces. A third
type, the resistance furnace, is still used in the production of silicon carbide and electrolytic
aluminum; in this type, the furnace charge (i.e., the material to be heated) serves as the
resistance element. In one type of resistance furnace, the heat-producing current is
introduced by electrodes buried in the metal

Bessemer Furnace It consisted of a large vessel charged with molten

iron, through which cold air was blown. There was a spectacular reaction resulting from the
combination of impurities in the iron manufacturing in Bessemer converters a kind of lowphosphorus steel known as Thomas steel. In the Thomas-Gilchrist process the lining used
in the converter is basic rather than acidic, and it captures the acidic phosphorus oxides
formed upon blowing air through molten iron made from the high-phosphorus iron ore
prevalent in Europe.

Basic oxygen process

(>BOP), a steelmaking method in which pure oxygen is blown into a bath of molten
blast-furnace iron and scrap. The oxygen initiates a series of intensively exothermic (heatreleasing) reactions, including the oxidation of such impurities as carbon, silicon,
phosphorus, and manganese.
The advantages of using pure oxygen instead of air in refining pig iron into steel were
recognized as early as 1855 by Henry Bessemer, but the process could not be brought to
commercial fruition until the 20th century, when large tonnages of cheap, high-purity
oxygen became available.