THE COREX® PROCESS: Historical Development and Innovation of a new Smelting Process in the Iron-Making Industry

This work deals with the topic of how a new smelting reduction process influenced the iron and steel making industry till today. It covers the history of the iron and steel production, the development of the COREX® plant and the influence of environmental restrictions and future perspectives for this iron-making process. COREX® was the first industrial smelting reduction process just driven by normal coal, which is available all over the world. It started with promising test results at a time engineers were of the opinion that this process will revolutionize the whole iron market. Somehow it did but difficulties occurred, technical as well as economical ones, which slowed down the COREX®'s way of success.