Talk:Blast furnace/GA2

GA Sweeps

Initial assessment

This article has been reviewed as part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles/Project quality task force in an effort to ensure all listed Good articles continue to meet the Good article criteria. In reviewing the article, I have found there are some issues that may need to be addressed.

• If this article is intending to consider the use of blast furnaces for other than the production of pig iron, as the lead suggests, then it should do so. In the short term it may simply be better to remove the very short Other metals section.

• There has been a {{clarifyme}} tag in Modern process since March.

• The article should be clear and consistent in the way it uses units of measurement. In the Modern furnaces subsection a conversion to imperial is given for blast furnace volume, not for the metric amount of iron produced per week, and the following paragraph switches to tons (long tons?), again without a conversion.

• The references and citations need to be tidied up. Having separate Notes and Bibliography sections will avoid duplicating sources like ref#1 and ref#5. Full publication details (date, publisher, isbn) need to be given for each printed source used. Ideally, the page or page numbers being used to support the material should be given in every case.

• Ref#20 just strings three books together. Why?

• Many common words are wikilinked, like "hydraulics", "timberland", and "winches". It makes the text distracting to see so many blue links. Only those topics that will add understanding to this article should be linked.

I will check back in no less than seven days. If progress is being made and issues are being addressed, the article will remain listed as a Good article. Otherwise, it may be delisted (such a decision may be challenged through WP:GAR). If improved after it has been delisted, it may be nominated at WP:GAN. Feel free to drop a message on my talk page if you have any questions, and many thanks for all the hard work that has gone into this article thus far. Regards, Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 18:29, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

I completely rewrote the section that had the {{clarifyme}} note, so it should be good now. Wizard191 (talk) 23:15, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I think I took care of everything else other than your first note. Hopefully that will keep it in the good graces of the GA. Wizard191 (talk) 01:48, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for all the work you've done. I've moved that very short Other metals section to talk, and also removed mention of it from the lead. If it's ever expanded, then of course it can be put back. I'd have preferred it if all of the published sources were separated out into the Bibliography subsection, and referenced from Notes, but I'm not going to be a bar steward over that. Obviously though, if there's any intention to take this article on to FA, the reference formatting will very likely be a significant problem. However, I'm happy now to confirm that this article has kept its GA listing. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 02:26, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

• Can we lose the references to Woods? As far as I can make out, this is a derivative source, and not directly concerned with ironmaking technology. For example I very much doubt that blast furnace slag (a glassy material) was used as a fertiliser, and suspect that the author has become confused by basic slag from a 19th century open hearth process. However I have failed to locate any better English-language sources on monastic ironmaking in Champagne.

I don't know if that whole paragraph even belongs in this article. I feel like the contributor made a stretch adding it. I thing it should just be removed. Wizard191 (talk) 00:00, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

• The material on Laskill seems to be based on newspaper reports (except Vernon et al, which is more about the research techniques used). The findings remains controversial, and no academic publication of the archaeological work has yet taken place.
• The answer to the non-iron stub (below) may be to refer to it briefly in the introduction with a link to a new stub article on Non-ferrous Blast Furnaces. Peterkingiron (talk) 15:43, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't think that a whole new article is needed for non-ferrous blast furnace. I think if the section is fleshed out it would fit well. I just don't think it will ever become a huge section (thus needing it's own article). Wizard191 (talk) 00:00, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

GA Reassessment

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch
Has been missing a citation since 2017, but the main problem is lack of up to date info, such as hydrogen and CCS. Has lots of great history so I hope someone will be able to update the article. Chidgk1 (talk) 12:26, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

My comment is that the complaint about hydrogen and CCS is not justification for downgrading the article. If the article is factually incorrect, that would be a reason. I presume that CCS means carbon capture and storage. I think this would be the subject of a separate article and not be a required inclusion for every article on Wikipedia to justify a "good article" status. If the complainant would like to have a discussion of the use of hydrogen included, I suggest he or she do a literature search and add a section rather than arbitrarily downgrading what might otherwise be a good reference.

ChrisFountain::Sorry too busy to fix article myself. The justification is ::https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_article_criteria#The_six_good_article_criteria

number 3: that the article was "broad in coverage" at the time it was last reviewed but is not now. Yes you are right Carbon capture and storage. Sources re significant developments since the last review:

https://www.globalccsinstitute.com/news-media/insights/ccs-a-necessary-technology-for-decarbonising-the-steel-sector/

https://www.worldsteel.org/en/dam/jcr:9480b8a4-1ff8-4b46-80c7-0a78fcd2d04b/Carbon%2520Capture%2520Storage_vf.pdf

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06886-8

https://bellona.org/news/climate-change/2021-03-hydrogen-in-steel-production-what-is-happening-in-europe-part-one

Also just noticed that relationship with Basic oxygen steelmaking could be more clearly explained. And whether blast furnace will be outcompeted by arc furnace or Direct reduced iron. Also shaft furnace redirects here from Shaft furnace breather and is mentioned in lead but not enough in body of article. Chidgk1 (talk) 13:29, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Some of the criticism is misplaced. A blast furnace makes pig iron, not carbon steel.

• Direct reduced iron is not produced in a blast furnace. This is a different process, in which the metal does not become liquid. The fuel used has traditionally been natural gas (a waste product in oilfields), but hydrogen could be substituted and probably will be. Direct reduced iron suffers from the disadvantage that the gangue has not been removed, so that it may have to be melted in a blast furnace to remove these impurities.
• Electric arc furnace is not a competitor or technological successor to the blast furnace. Its function is to recycle steel, sometimes with the addition of fresh material, which might include pig iron.
• I have just made a number of changes - removing an unwarranted statement about Backbarrow and providing more detail on blowing arrangments. Peterkingiron (talk) 16:58, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

Peterkingiron Thanks for that explanation and your edits - I am glad an expert is on the case - I can just about remember drawing a blast furnace in school but that is all I know. You wrote the interesting sentence: "The blast furnace is likely to become obsolete to meet climate change objectives of reducing carbon dioxide emission." If a shaft furnace is a kind of blast furnace could you expand the text about it and if not amend the redirect mentioned above? Because one of the links above seems to be saying a shaft furnace would be used in future. Chidgk1 (talk) 18:13, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

Also, although the images and history are excellent, I could not see in the article some basic info about today. I don't mean exact figures but rough estimates for e.g. how many/much BF in world, which countries, how old? Nowadays there must be far more online sources than when the article was last reviewed in 2008. Chidgk1 (talk) 06:19, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

I see other languages have 3 featured (gold star) articles - perhaps editors of this article can get info and ideas from those. Chidgk1 (talk) 08:11, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Despite me asking again at the metalworking project for more editors no one else has come forward to help Peterkingiron, so there are still lots of problem tags including 2 which are years old. ChrisFountain - could you assist? Chidgk1 (talk) 18:29, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

Hello, I am the writer of the French featured article. Imo, CCS, hydrogen steelmaking, and related technologies are fields of research and not proven improvement of blast furnaces. The future of blast furnace could be the use of charcoal, the burning of plastics, the boiethanol, more taxes on a more efficient tool, the help of electricity and/or NG, reducing hot blast,... It could also be a mix of different technologies on the same tool, or a single choice depending on the location.

Blast furnaces were invented 2000 years before, and latest patents about greenhouse gas reduction are not proven revelant. Today, nobody is able to predict the future of blast furnace, and the trend will be known in 10 years... if any evolution occurs!

So, downgrading this article because these researches are not developed is not, for me, a good reason. Oxygen blast furnace and CCS are clearly on a downward slope since 2012 because of huge Capex need and CO2 storage. Environmental impact is not the good word because blast furnaces are "clean" tools compared to sinter plant or other metallurgical processes. The way that Chidgk1 wants to update this article will lead to an original research and should not pollute this article.

It remains that this article is pretty poor, compared to the French one, and compared with other languages (Ukrainian, German). But its problems are clearly not the lack of modern exploratory technologies. Borvan53 (talk) 20:22, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

Bonjour Borvan53 - nice to hear from you and congratulations on getting your article featured. I wonder if you would be able to bring this article up to scratch. As your article is already featured and your English is C2 level I guess it would not take a lot of your time. No need for perfect grammar as I can do any minor copyedit tweaks once you finish - and I will not object to cites remaining in French. Chidgk1 (talk) 07:09, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Hello Chidgk1. My contributions were too often reverted on the English Wikipedia to waste much time here. I will only recommend you to group all considerations about greenhouse gas reduction in a distinct section. This section could be named "current research related with greenhouse gas reduction", or something like that.
Translating my article in English will lead to a very high quality article, as the gold label in the French Wikipedia is far more stringent than the English one. The French article is itself an improved translation of the German one (30% of it content comes from it). Ukrainian article is not featured, but it is written by Blast furnace chip worker, who has a deep knowledge of the topic. Borvan53 (talk) 08:02, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for those suggestions. I am reassessing this article not bringing it up to standard myself. I understand what you are saying about reversions as I had the same on Turkish Wikipedia. But your English is far better than my Turkish. If you are kind enough to edit this article and your edits are unjustly reverted I will strongly complain. Chidgk1 (talk) 08:40, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Unfortunately it seems no one is going to complete bringing this article back up to standard. Therefore I conclude this article is no longer a good article because, for example, tags from 2017 and 2018 have not been dealt with, and it lacks basic info such as an estimate of how much BF capacity there is in the world. Chidgk1 (talk) 05:45, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Agree it needs a good overhaul and removal of some suspected industry-related meddling (not industry sponsored, but I suspect there are a few editors affiliated to BFs who don't like the environmental discussion. PutTheKettleOn (talk) 11:28, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Confused re oldid so asked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Good_article_reassessment#Instructions_for_what_to_put_in_oldid_when_failed_GAR Chidgk1 (talk) 06:21, 17 July 2021 (UTC)