Polish coke

This is not the end of the blast furnace coke legacy and coking plants’ ancestors. How was iron smelted all around the world? Other than in China, for sure. Europeans didn’t use blast furnaces but bloomeries. This process was used by all civilizations of the west, such as Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians and Celts. Several examples of boomery industry were found in France and Tunisia. Scientists suggest that bloomeries were in use also in Antioch during the Hellenistic Period. In parallel, smelting in bloomery-type furnaces was popular in Kush and West Africa.

An improved bloomery, (so called Catalan forge) was invented during the eighth century in Spanish region named Catalonia. Instead of using natural draught air was pumped in by bellows, which caused much better quality of produced iron and further increased capacity of chamber, so the Catalan forges could be built bigger than natural draught bloomeries. The process of pumping the airstream in with bellows is known as a cold blast. It improves yield and also increases the fuel efficiency of the bloomery. There is only a very short step from Catalan forges using charcoal to the true blast furnaces using blast furnace coke. But the real adventure with metallurgy was still ahead.

CATEGORY: blast furnace coke