What are the environmental impacts of smelting?

What are the environmental impacts of smelting?

The smelting of sulfide ores results in the emission of sulfur dioxide gas, which reacts chemically in the atmosphere to form a sulfuric acid mist. As this acid rain falls to the earth, it increases the acidity of soils, streams, and lakes, harming the health of vegetation and fish and wildlife populations.

What is atmosphere furnace?

But an atmospheric furnace is simply a furnace that draws on air inside a home in order to mix with the natural gas from the burner and allow combustion to occur. A grill on the furnace pulls in this air for the combustion process. This, in turn, pulls air from the rest of the house.

How does furnace smelting work?

In the smelting process a metal that is combined with oxygen—for example, iron oxide—is heated to a high temperature, and the oxide is caused to combine with the carbon in the fuel, escaping as carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. In modern copper smelting, a reverberatory furnace is used.

What type of furnace is used for smelting?

Smelting most prominently takes place in a blast furnace to produce pig iron, which is converted into steel.

What are three major harmful environmental effects of smelting?

Some of the major harmful environmental effects of smelting, include: emissions of enormous quantities of air pollutants, and water pollution. Describe the conventional view of the relationship between the supply of a mineral resource and its market price.

Why is smelting bad?

Health Effects Exposure to airborne pollutants from metal processing and smelting can lead to various acute and chronic diseases. Initial sudden exposure can lead to an irritation of the eyes, nose and throat. More serious and chronic effects are heart and lung problems, and even premature death.

Why is the atmosphere important in furnaces?

Why Furnace Atmosphere Is Important The atmosphere in a heat treatment process can be a critical factor: it may act as a carrier for key elements in the process, or it may act to protect the part being heat treated from the effects of exposure to air while also exposed to substantially elevated temperatures.

What gas is used in a furnace?

natural gas
The most common fuel source for modern furnaces in North America and much of Europe is natural gas; other common fuel sources include LPG (liquefied petroleum gas), fuel oil, wood and in rare cases coal.

What is the purpose of smelting?

The smelting process melts the ore, usually for a chemical change to separate the metal, thereby reducing or refining it. The smelting process requires lots of energy to extract the metal from the other elements. There are other methods of extraction of pure metals from their ores.

What is the difference between a furnace and smelter?

As nouns the difference between furnace and smelter is that furnace is a device for heating while smelter is a person employed to do smelting.

Which furnace is used for heating metals?

A metallurgical furnace, more commonly referred to as a furnace, is a device used to heat and melt metal ore to remove gangue, primarily in iron and steel production.