Ferroalloy

Ferroalloy refers to various alloys of iron with a high proportion of one or more other elements such as manganese (Mn), aluminium (Al), or silicon (Si).

The leading producers of ferroalloys in 2014 were China, South Africa, India, Russia and Kazakhstan, which accounted for 84% of the world production.

More commonly, ferroalloys are produced by carbothermic reactions, involving reduction of oxides with carbon (as coke) in the presence of iron.

Most of the chromite ore production was smelted in electric-arc furnaces to produce ferrochromium for the metallurgical industry.

[2] Major producers of ferromolybdenum are Chile (16,918 t), China (40,000 t) and the United States (which, in 2008, accounted for 78% of world molybdenite ore production.

[2] In 2014, about 33% of the world’s annual new nickel was ferronickel,[8] an extensive review article of which was published by Swartzendruber et al in 1991.

[15] The energy consumption per tonne of product is high for laterite ores because of the low-grade feed, and hence produces a lot of waste slag and gaseous pollution.

[18] "The main reason for adding nickel in ferrous alloys is to promote an austenitic microstructure.

Ukraine, Indonesia, Greece, and Macedonia, in descending order of gross weight output, all produced between 68,000 t and 90,000 t of ferronickel, accounting for an additional 31%, excluding China.

China was excluded from statistics because its industry produced large tonnages of nickel pig iron in addition to a spectrum of conventional ferronickel grades, for an estimated combined output of 590,000 t gross weight.

The nickel content of individual Chinese products varied from about 1.6% to as much as 80%, depending upon customer end use.

[2] The nickel pig iron is a low grade ferronickel made in China, which is very popular since the 2010s.

During steelmaking, titanium is usually introduced as ferrotitanium because of its relatively low melting temperature and high density.

In these three countries, vanadium was primarily recovered from titanium-bearing magnetite ore processed to produce pig iron.