Steel by Brooke C. Stoddard

Author:Brooke C. Stoddard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

A portion of the control room for the L blast furnace.

Gilpin passed this piece of hardware and stepped into the control room. The room was a rectangle, half a football field long and fifty feet wide, with a dropped ceiling of acoustic tile set flush with fluorescent lighting and tile flooring raised over electronic cables below. The main control structure was a freestanding wall, appropriately L shaped, eighty-five feet long and seven feet high, set just forward of two of the room’s outside walls. Along the panel wall hung a schematic of the entire blast furnace function: heating the air, adding the ingredients, monitoring the exhaust gases, and more. Imitating the wall’s shape but closer to the middle of the room was a three-foot-high console of knobs. In the middle of the room sat a shorter, rectangular table holding computer terminals, screens, and printers. In the space remaining was a low-walled cubicle corralling three desks. The room had no windows, so no one inside could see the blast furnace a hundred yards away. In all, the consoles and the panel wall sported eight hundred indicator lights, any number of which were glowing or blinking at one time. Arrow gauges, needle graphs, and digital displays proliferated. Two television monitors hung above the freestanding wall. Anyone unversed in the kind of schematics laid upon the panel wall would have no clue that this room was connected with the making of steel—there was no soot and the technicians walked about in shirtsleeves. The room resembled Cape Canaveral Mission Control but with five people. Prominently placed above the panel wall and lights hung a large American flag.

Gilpin strode down the panel wall, past a schematic of the four 140-foot-high stoves that heated the air for the blast. Each stove valve was represented in raised and colored metal and marked with two lights—green for closed and red for open; one was always glowing. Next came sixteen feet of schematics of the stockhouse bins—one each for ore, coke, limestone, and, a specialty at Sparrows Point, sinter, which is recycled iron-rich dust.

Schematic lines that connected schematic bins represented conveyor belts. At the bottom, near the floor, was a wide horizontal line that led to the junction with a second, similar line. This second one then rose at a forty-five-degree angle across the next panel to the representation of a large hopper, below which was the representation of another hopper; below these were three smaller hoppers. These, beginning with the horizontal line, represented the main conveyor in the stockhouse; the conveyor that rose from the stockhouse to the furnace top; the collecting hopper; the distribution hopper; and three pressurized chambers, called lock hoppers, from which the raw materials fell into the furnace.

At the joint of the two walls came the panel holding the schematic for the exhaust gases and cooling water. On the short wall was the schematic for the air-blowing engines. Near the ceiling where the walls join was a tandem indicator. The lower half held three

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