A Discussion on manufacturing technology in the 1980s - Metallurgical processes

Abstract

The shape of metallurgical processes in the 1980s will be basically similar to those obtaining today modified to accommodate solutions to various constraints, industrial and economic. These include the availability and relative costs of different sources of energy, a need to reduce production costs and improve product quality to meet market requirements new and existing, and the general pressures to provide healthier working conditions and greater job satisfaction for employees. It is expected that oil and natural gas will be more extensively used as sources of energy and as a supplement to coking coal for the reduction of iron ore, but the prospect of diminishing reserves will, in the longer run, focus increasing attention on nuclear energy for metallurgical uses. Further reductions in manufacturing costs may be expected as the result of an increasing scale of operation, but there may also be opportunities for smaller scale enterprises using different technologies to coexist profitably with the larger works of the future with advantages to both. The increasing scale of metallurgical operations raises the question of continuous versus batch processing. In both ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy the processes of extraction, casting and working are for the most part continuous in that the material flows through the plant but are operated intermittently because refining is still done in batches in various types of melting and refining vessels. In spite of efforts to increase the continuity of metal manufacture, the advantages are by no means all on one side and these are discussed. There have been many attempts to speed up the rate of reaction of metallurgical processes in the interests of increasing productivity. These may be based on the provision of a higher surface to volume ratio, as in the flash smelting or fluidized bed treatment of copper ores, or on more concentrated reagents such as the use of oxygen in steelmaking. Other examples of not only speeding up metallurgical reactions but substantially reducing the subsequent processing and working of metals by new means are referred to. A comparison of a metallurgical works (in steel or elsewhere) of today with one of 50 years ago would show how much has been done to improve the conditions of work. The generation of heat, noise and dust is inseparable from metallurgical operation on a large scale and the metallurgical processes of the 1980s will almost certainly embody improved methods of keeping this under control.