The steel melts into the ladle with a hole in the open bottom with a plug material, for its lifting and a handle for its overturning. Once the ladle has been raised it is placed on top of iron molds and the metal is poured. After casting, the ingot molds are brought into the stripping department, that is to say the ingots are freshly extracted from the ingot molds.
Continuous casting is one of the most important processes where industrial melting is part of the process, where the material is in a liquid state, during the initial phase, a false billet is placed on the bottom to block the liquid which after a page of minutes it begins to solidify on contact with the walls. Thanks to the forced cooling in the ingot mold the metal solidifies on the surface while it remains liquid in most of the internal part of the Tool and Die Service section.
The solidified metal has a smaller volume than the liquid one, therefore it detaches from the lubricated walls of the mold, then the colot piece must be cut to size by means of an oxygen flame and left to cool completely due to the air. In addition, the continuous casting offers the advantage of producing a more homogeneous and quality steel.
Composed essentially of iron and carbon, steel is an alloy that is characterized by its remarkable mechanical properties of resistance to stress and which, depending on the proportion of the substances with which it is made, takes on different consistencies and hardnesses.
The discovery of the methods of industrial production of steel constituted a revolution, and today steel is considered a real valuable material, subject to economic cycles such as oil. Also for this reason new alloys are being studied that have characteristics similar to steel but that use different materials as part of the Tool and Die Service.
The main component of steel is iron, but this pure metal has little interest in the industry, also because it is perpetually oxidized, that is combined with oxygen. It is necessary to expel this substance, by heating it to a temperature above 1,500 ° C, so that the iron acquires some utility and can be worked. Much more important than pure iron are ferrous alloys, made up of several metals among which iron is the main one. Steel, together with iron, is one of the most important ferrous alloys.
