I visited the wonderful York Model RR club on several occassions a number of years ago. I took this photo of their steel furnace that had this added-on structure at the rear. Can anyone identify it?
Brian
My Layout Plan
Interesting new Plan Consideration
A Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster (SRB)?
OK, let's try a packed tower design wet scrubber?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00022470.1977.10470539
I saw lots of mills around the Cleveland area get large ductwork and various pollution control systems installed after the Clean Air Act.
Regards, Ed
Could it be a small specialty arc furnace set up for vacuum oxygen decarburization (e.g. for stainless that needs to have impurities removed but not reactive alloy constituents like chromium)
(The AOD process uses argon purge and blanketing to accomplish a cycle faster without the need for a full high-vacuum-pump train at furnace scale...)
Ed may be right concerning the need to control electric-furnace exhaust or process gases... that device on the top looks like a particle separator of some kind.
It's difficult to tell from the photo, but the "steel furnace" in the background looks more like a blast furnace to me, and a blast furnace produces iron.
To turn iron into steel, there were several methods, including the Bessemer process, the open hearth process, BOF (basic oxygen furnace) and electric furnaces, too. I won't even hazard a guess as to what pupose that structure serves, but most blast furnaces had various pollution control equipment, including precipitators, baghouses, gas scrubbers, etc., etc. As best I recall, little or none of that was within a building, due to its size.
Wayne
To shorten things, there is a sign on the building saying 'Electric Furnace #1'. Assuming this is not some foobie example of selective compression, it would be a facility for making up small-batch specialty steels or special alloys. Probably not too involved as it's in a cheap metal building, so perhaps tool or bearing alloys?
Such a thing requires 'controlled atmosphere' and as I see no gas blanketing tanks I suspect vacuum, which would have to be pulled with reasonable speed to a fairly high degree, probably in multiple stages. Oxygen should not be difficult to come by in a 'steel mill'...
I find I don't know if this sort of facility would work 'better' starting with blast iron and doing all the decarburizing and purification right there, or taking process steel from 'whatever' the mill's principal output is and improving that selectively...
For the record, I was assuming that the OP's question concerned the orange column being installed at the back of Electric Furnace #1, which if a scrubber might be 'about to be connected' to the downcoming pipe from the roof...
I followed a lot of Mike Rabbitt's steel mill layout for a while. He made quite a few large prints available for layouts of equipment that were invaluable to the modeler.
This link has many photos of his layout:
http://www.phillynmra.org/archives/layout/mike-rabbitt-lake-erie-mad-river
If you look at the photo three columns over and three down you can see he has a scratch-built scrubber coming off the downcomer of his blast furnace. Perhaps the modeler at York was using something like this as inspiration.
Dean freytag and Bernard Kempinski both have helpful books avaliable for the steel industry modeler.
Hate to be a curmudgeon but after 50 years in the steel industry the building and column look like nothing I ever saw in a steel mill. This includes mills in the uSA, Canada, Mexico, Japan, England, Holland, Germany and six other countries. In my opinion it is a very poor novice space filler with no reality in the real world. The colors aren't even correct for a US Steel building. If they are happy with it that is all that matters. Modeling the steel industry is mostly a joke. A blast furnace or melt shop alone consume land bigger the the rooms most modelers have available. Who wants to add an airport with a 6" Runway and call it O' Hare?
ndbprrThe colors aren't even correct for a US Steel building.
So true:
Weirton_mill by Edmund, on Flickr
Cheers, Ed
ndbprrIn my opinion it is a very poor novice space filler with no reality in the real world.
That is what I thought when I first saw it, but held back my response because I am far from deeply knowledgable about the steel industry.
-Kevin
Living the dream.
ndbprrHate to be a curmudgeon but after 50 years in the steel industry the building and column look like nothing I ever saw in a steel mill...
I have to agree.
ndbprr...Modeling the steel industry is mostly a joke. A blast furnace or melt shop alone consume land bigger the the rooms most modelers have available....
About 50 years ago, I decided to build an HO scale model of a blast furnace, and contacted the Tech Services Dept. at STELCO, the steel plant at which I worked. I was given a thick sheaf of blueprints related to "E" Furnace, at that time the largest blast furnace in North America. My need at that time was for the major dimensions, but was invited to ask for more drawings should they be required.
I managed to construct the basic shell of the furnace and the majority of the casthouse, along with the two-track skip bridge that fed the furnace, and was about to start construction of the bustle pipe and shell cooling-castings, but was running out of funds for materials, so contacted the company to see if they would fund the project, which I would turn over to them as a display for their head office.
The response was amenable, but they asked me to bring what was already constructed, in order to appraise the workmanship - the casthouse and furnace shell, at that point, built only to the "bell" (where the coke and ore enters the furnace) was almost 3' high, and the casthouse occupied most of a 3'x3' slab of plywood...there was no way it would fit into my small car.The uptakes and downcomer pipe would have added almost another foot to the over-all height, while the three stoves, a large array of pollution control devices and a stockhouse aproximately 6' long would have required a lot more real estate, so I had to decline. Over the next few years, I reluctantly disassembled what had been built, and, with some regret, disposed of almost all of it.
Here are a few photos...
The real one, near the slag pit...
...and the model...
...this shows the upper end of the real one's skip bridge....
(Cameras were not allowed on company property, and I would have been terminated had I been caught.)
The lower portion of the modelled skip bridge, built from basswood shapes, as were the roof trusses shown in the earlier model photo....
All of the structural shapes and the corrugated siding were milled basswood, while the brickwork was embossed clear plastic sheets from Holgate and Reynolds.
The model was planned to have a removeable roof and a fairly good representation of the interior, including the two overhead cranes, one in each wing of the "V"-shaped casthouse.
While I still have number of those roof trusses, the last remainder of my folly was one of those cranes.
Since it wasn't going to be used in a blast furnace, I modified it to represent one based on features of a number of overhead cranes in the mill in which I worked. It now resides behind the locomotive shops in Lowbanks...
Everyone knows O'Hare has 8" runways.
EnzoampsEveryone knows O'Hare has 8" runways.
Even shorter at Meigs Field!
https://www.avgeekery.com/united-727-made-a-sporty-final-landing-at-meigs-field-for-museum-exhibit/
Ed