US Patent Issued to Midrex Technologies, Kobe Steel on Dec. 16 for "Hot metal production from DRI with electric arc heating" (Japanese, American Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,497,668, issued on Dec. 16, was assigned to Midrex Technologies Inc. and Kobe Steel Ltd. (Kobe, Japan).

"Hot metal production from DRI with electric arc heating" was invented by Haruyasu Michishita (Charlotte, N.C.), Koji Tokuda (Kobe, Japan), Tsuyoshi Mimura (Kobe, Japan) and Katsuma Fujiwara (Kobe, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "According to embodiments, disclosed is a method and system to maintain the soft and sparse slag characteristic favorable for an electric arc to efficiently transfer the energy to molten iron with the power input per furnace area higher than 600 KW/m2 while keeping FeO amount less than 5% in the slag and c...