Transactions of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers Volume 43 - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 Excerpt: ... as are now being produced, as few of them, aside from some of the European brown-coal products, bear any resemblance to the shape of that well-known article. The VOL. XLIII.--22 term "agglomeration" has therefore been chosen as more accurately descriptive of the products How being manufactured, this term including the molding as well as the sintering. With the increasing prices of fuel and ores and the greater demand for economy in the operation of industrial plants, more attention has been paid in recent years to the utilization of waste products and low-grade ores and fuels. Much of the waste has been occasioned by the inability to utilize finelydivided ores and fuels in the furnaces because they could not be kept there, or else because they clogged up the furnaceshaft so that gases could not be forced through under ordinary conditions of operation. As a result, all such fines were thrown on the dump. Again, with the exhaustion of the richer deposits of ores, concentration of lower-grade ores becomes a necessity, and most concentrates are produced in a finelydivided condition. Aside from these considerations, there is also the economy in the cost of operating the plant; a furnace running on agglomerated material will have a much greater output than one working on fines. In one instance the charge of an iron blastfurnace was changed from fine concentrates to briquettes and the output was increased four-fold; better results could have been obtained had facilities been at hand for taking care of the increased output. To attempt to catalogue all the materials that have been agglomerated by one or another process is manifestly impracticable, and I give here a list of only a few of the more important ones at present attracting attention: I. Fuels.--I...