The Role of the Pilot Plant in Iron ore Sintering

Abstract

The growing appreciation of the benefits of blast furnace burden preparation in the post-war years had led to a demand by the Iron and Steel Industry for greater Sinter production.This has been the stimulus of process devel-opment work and of research into the fundamentals of the sintering process. The importance of such studies ,as first realised by the industry in 1952 when B.I.S.R.A.,together with the experimental department of one of the large British Iron and Steel manufacturers, undertook a joint programme of laboratory and plant scale experiments which resulted in the elucidation of many physical factors controlling the sintering process. A symposium including this work was held in London in 1953, and interest grew rapidly, until it became of a universal nature. Many of the Iron and Steel manufacturers in Great Britain & abroad now devote proportion of their research and development resource to further studies in this field, and several national meta-llurgical organisations of other countries include sint-ering problems in their research programmes.