Iron and Steel Works

Recovering metals from ore is called smelting, this is usually done by heating the ore to the melting point of the metal in a blast furnace. This drives off some of the impurities and others burn in the furnace to form gasses, meanwhile the required metal melts and this can be separated from other molten materials (slag) by settling them out. As shipping the low value ore is relatively more expensive than moving the high value pure metal the smelting areas were in the main located close by the mines. There were exceptions however, the South Wales tin plate and copper smelting firms had plentiful supplies of good quality coal close to hand and used ore carried cheaply by sea from Cornwall. Also in some cases the local industry was sufficiently strong to justify the movement of ore or partially refined metal when the local supplies ran out. A good example of the latter is the carriage of pig iron from Cleveland to the iron works in Staffordshire and Shropshire in the later nineteenth century to allow these works to continue working when their own deposits had been worked out. General History of the Iron and Steel making process Iron is probably the most important metal known to man, without it life as we know it today could not exist. Although other metals are used in considerable quantity, notably aluminium, copper, tin, lead and zinc, iron is still the most important. Iron possesses magnetic properties which allowed the development of electrical power. Both iron and steel are the same material but in the latter more of the impurities (mainly carbon) are removed. The British Industrial Revolution, the first in the world, was based on iron, the rest of the world industrialised later and based their machines on steel. Many of the processes involved in smelting iron and making steel required chambers lined with heat resistant bricks. Although heat resistant these bricks are not heat proof and they had to be replaced at intervals (a dirty job by all accounts), hence wagon loads of bricks would be a feature of both iron and steel works. The fire bricks are XXX in colour. XXX More on fire bricks XXX Fig ___ Iron & Steel Making Flow Diagram

Iron was discovered thousands of years ago but early extraction methods relied on charcoal made from wood which was time consuming, expensive and only available in small quantities. Up to 1709 charcoal was used as a fuel for the blast furnaces which separate the iron from the oxygen and other impurities.

Abraham Darby then developed the use of coke in place of charcoal, he did not protect the process with patents and this allowed the rapid development of the iron industry. In Darby's time British iron production was running at 17,000 tons a year, by the 1950's it was up to over fifteen million tons a year. The 'pig iron' produced in the blast furnace has a high carbon content and cannot practically be used for very much. if however it is re-melted more impurities can be removed. This re-melting is usually done in a small scale blast furnace called a 'cupola furnace' (invented in the 1790's by a British ironmaster called John Wilkinson). Scrap metal can be recycled in this furnace along with the pig iron. The molten iron which comes out of a cupola furnace flows well and can be used to make solid castings, it is called 'cast iron'. Cast iron contains a lot of carbon and tends to be brittle, it serves well under compression but is poor when placed under tension. Places which take in pig iron to make cast iron are called 'foundries', you would normally have a foundry associated with an iron works but there were also small establishments catering to local industry (most towns had at least two small foundries) and larger engineering works often had their own foundry on-site.

Pig iron can be used to make cast iron goods in a foundry (see also Lineside Industries - Scrap metal yards, Foundries and Forges) but this material, although resistant to rusting and strong under compression, is brittle and cannot be re-heated and shaped. Cast iron is still widely used today (motor car engine blocks are made of cast iron).

If you remove nearly all the carbon from pig iron or cast iron you get 'wrought iron' (sometimes called 'malleable iron' in older texts) which contains less than 0.1% carbon and about 3% 'slag'. Wrought iron is much stronger under tension than cast iron and the slag forms a coating or skin on the surface which imparts certain qualities to the metal, notably corrosion resistance. Wrought iron can be hammered into shape when red hot so places where wrought iron was made are usually called 'forges' (a forge is a hammer and an anvil). Originally wrought iron was made by beating bars of red hot cast iron and beating it to de-form it and allow the air to get at more of the carbon (which then burns away). This was done in a works known as a 'finery'.

In 1784 an iron works owner by the name of Henry Cort obtained a patent for producing wrought iron in bulk by stirring molten iron in a reverbatory furnace (a process known as 'puddling', for a description of a reverbatory furnace see Lineside Industries - Prototype industrial ancillary structures). What happens is that the air would oxidise and remove some of the remaining carbon (becoming CO2 gas) producing low carbon wrought iron. Mr Cort also developed and patented a hot rolling process for iron heated until it was the consistency of a thick paste and then passed between powered rollers in a rolling mill which produced better quality iron much faster. The combination of these two developments allowed his works to produce about fifteen times as much iron in a given time and with a given amount of fuel. Cort's business partner was then prosecuted for fraud and (as he was a full partner) Cort was also held responsible and his patents (both for the puddling furnace and his wrought iron rolling mills) were confiscated and thrown open to all manufacturers, the result was a massive increase in wrought iron production. The combination of cast and wrought iron along with Mr Cort's rolling mill allowed the industrial revolution to mechanise production but by the 1870's iron production had peaked and the industry went into slow decline as steel began to become the more significant material.

Cort's puddling process was further improved in 1816 when Joseph Hall of Tipton developed an oxygen rich lining for the puddling furnace (this was called 'wet puddling' to differentiate it from Cort's system which in turn became known as 'dry puddling'). A small quantity of haematite ore is added to the pigs of iron in the cupola at the foundry. The oxygen in the haematite (Fe3O2) combines with most of the carbon in the pig iron to form carbon dioxide and the resulting iron has less than 0.1% carbon in it.

Wrought iron can be heated and rolled into long strips or sheets. The first sheet rolling mill was built in Wales in about 1720 but machines for cutting hand made sheets into strips had been in use since the sixteenth century. Henry Cort's iron rolling mills using grooved rollers which produced bars of standard thickness represented a major advance.

Wrought iron can also be formed to shape by beating it and belting it with a hammer or pressing it over a former. This heating and forming with hammers and presses is called forging. A forge consists of a solid base and a hammer, a blacksmith's forge had the anvil and the blacksmith used a hand held hammer. The early 'industrial' forges used water-power to drive the hammer, steam powered hammers were invented in Britain in 1839 by James Naysmith (1808-1890) and further developed in France in 1842. Wrought iron was formed in the forge to make bridge parts, sections for ship building and railway lines. In 1861 the British developed the hydraulic press which was strong enough to force iron sheets to shape.

Steel is iron with all the carbon removed and a little added back in, this produces something chemically similar to wrought iron but with a different crystalline structure. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century it was made in small pots (called 'crucible steel') and prices reflected the small scale and labour intensive manufacture. By the 1850's Britain was producing several million tons of iron in various forms every year but only a little steel. Things changed in the mid 1850's when Henry Bessemer invented his 'converter' in which air is blown through molten iron, the oxygen in the air burns away the carbon to produce very pure wrought iron. To clear away the oxygen dissolved in the molten metal and restore the required amount of carbon to make steel a little ferro-manganese (an alloy of iron, manganese and carbon) is then added. The manganese combines with any free oxygen whilst the carbon combines with the iron to make steel. The steel is teemed (poured into moulds) to form ingots which are then re-heated to enable them to be rolled or hammered into shape.

Bessemer's converter was a major breakthrough but it could only be used with very pure ores, most of which had to be imported from Spain and Sweden. Much of the iron ore in Britain (and in the rest of the world) is tainted with phosphorous and although it made good iron it could not be used for making steel. In 1876 Sidney Gilchrist Thomas working with his cousin discovered that he could line the Bessemer vessel or open hearth with crushed dolomite (MgOCaO), which reacts with and removes the phosphouous producing a phosphate slag which had the additional benefit of being a valuable fertiliser ('Basic Slag').

The next big development was the Siemens-Martin or open hearth process of 1866, using the reverbatory regenerative furnace invented by Frederick Siemens (1826-1904) in 1856. The regenerative furnace uses the waste heat generated to pre-heat incoming air instead of simply blowing it out of the top as in the Bessemer system. The re-use of the heat allows pigs of cold iron to be used to charge the furnace instead of the molten iron of the Bessemer system. To make 100 tons of steel in the open hearth system requires up to fifteen hours of careful work as opposed to about twenty minutes in the Bessemer converter. The open hearth process requires a lot more skill on the part of the operators, but it is a lot cheaper due to the re-use of the heat. The Bessemer system remained in use up to about 1925, rapidly decreasing in use after the First World War, and thereafter the Siemens open hearth method became the standard method for steel production world wide until the late 1950's.

In 1863 Henry Clifton Sorby (1826-1908) working in Sheffield discovered the microstructure of steel and founded modern metallurgical science. Steel gradually replaced wrought iron for most applications although wrought iron production peaked long after the development of steel and remained significant up to the 1930's. There was a puddling furnace producing wrought iron at the Butterly Ironworks which remained in use until 1965 (no better way of making wrought iron having been found). Cast iron's particular properties mean that it remains in use today.

The Basic Oxygen Process for making steel was developed in Austria in about 1950, and this system has turn largely replaced the open hearth system. The Basic Oxygen Process uses pure oxygen in large quantities (called 'tonnage oxygen') which is blown into the liquid metal to combine with the carbon and remove it (lime can also be injected to reduce the phosphorous content). The oxygen used for this system is usually made on site but when the on-site equipment is being serviced oxygen is delivered in British Oxygen Company liveried cryogenic (low temperature) railway tank wagons.

There is one other option for making steel, the electric furnace process, which offers the possibility of turning the heat up or down and thus controlling directly the creation of the steel. It costs a lot to make steel in this way so the technique is only used for making high grade alloy steels such as stainless steels and steel used for cutting tools.

By 1968 technology had improved to the point where molten steel could be poured into the top of a water cooled mould and drawn out as a continuous bar at the bottom. This technology was soon adopted in most of the worlds major steel works.

STEEL INDUSTRY IN IRAN. In 1927, plans were drawn up to establish smelting works in the north of the country to produce rail tracks domestically. This action was in connection with the go-ahead given by the parliament (Majles) to start the construction of a railway between Ḵor Musā and Moḥammara. Out of the railway budget, 4.5 million tomāns were earmarked for this purpose, and a German expert was engaged to make a feasibility study. Suitable iron had been found near Semnān, but no coal. The works would be dependent on the Šemšak coalmine, which was about 100 miles away, so a special railway would have to be built between the mine and the works; moreover, it was feared that the ore deposits at Semnān would be exhausted in fifteen years if the works were to operate at full capacity. As a result, the project fell through at the end of 1928. In early 1928 bids had actually been invited, despite the fact that the feasibility study had estimated the costs to be twice the amount which the Majles had allotted, while the German Krupp corporation, one of the world’s principal steelmakers and arms manufacturers until the end of World War II, even estimated the costs to be much higher. Although the government shelved the project for the moment, it did not forget about it. In 1938, an agreement was reached, after much study and preparation, between Iran and a German consortium (Demag-Krupp) for the construction of two blast furnaces with a daily production of 150 tons, a steel factory, a rolling mill, a wire-drawing mill, a foundry, a wrought ironworks, a coke crusher, a power plant, and some ancillary industries such as a lime plant, an ammonia and benzol plant, and a tar distillation plant. The works were to be completed in three and a half years time and would employ 1,200 workers when working at full capacity. The original site was planned to be south of Tehran near the cement works, but Karaj was chosen instead, because of its more suitable water supply. A disadvantage, however, was that coal supplies for the power plant and the blast furnaces had to be transported from Šemšak and Zirāb at about 35 miles distance. In 1939, Reżā Shah laid the first foundation stone, and, although work proceeded as planned, the works were still unfinished in 1941 when the Allies invaded Iran. This event meant, of course, that the whole project was jeopardized, for all relations with Germany (q.v.) were cut, which led to the demise of the project. Part of the machinery was still at sea when World War II broke out and was seized by the Allies, and the rest remained in Germany and rusted away. The partly completed buildings at Karaj became dilapidated (Floor, 1984; Koellner). There were also a small number of traditional iron foundries and blast furnaces in Māzandarān, and the erection of a new plant in that area to smelt 300 tons of iron per day was being considered (Gupta, p. 75; Elwell-Sutton, p. 104). After World War II, the government wanted to complete the Karaj factory (subject to availability of coal) to manufacture rails, sleepers, iron beams and sheets (Zāhedi, pp. 58-64). However, the Overseas Consultants’ report advised against it (Roberts, p. 234; Overseas Consultants, IV, pp. 184-85). Since then, “more has been said and less done about a steel industry than any other industry in Iran” (Echo of Iran, 1965, p. 277). For the government persisted in its desire to have a steel mill and hired a continuous flow of 25 different groups of consultants, who all came to the same conclusion that the steel mill was not viable. Although the Krupp corporation agreed in 1952 to renew its contract to build the mill, the World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, IBRD) refused to finance the project in 1959. In 1961, a proposal prepared by the London-based Kaiser Engineers corporation for a rolling mill at Karaj, as the first phase of an integrated steel mill, also was unable to obtain IBRD financing. The project then was shelved, although funds had been allocated in the Third Development Plan. A project for a private foundry in Khuzestan to process imported scrap (35,000 tons per year) was approved. The project was only realized in 1963, when an agreement was reached between a private Iranian and a Swedish company to build the scrap metal steel mill. Meanwhile, the army’s munitions factories acquired a five-ton foundry and the Iranian State Railways a 10-ton per day electric arc foundry. Māšinsāzi-ye Irān, a private company, built a cast-iron foundry in 1960 at Ahvāz (q.v.) with an annual capacity of 6,000 tons. It produced mainly cast-iron pipes (Echo of Iran, 1963, pp. 277, 297; 1965, p. 239). The basis for future steel production in Iran was laid by the signing of a contract with the USSR in 1965 to finance and erect a steel plant in Isfahan (National Iranian Steel Company, NISC). Repayment of the loan was done through deliveries of natural gas from Iran to the USSR. The state-owned plant consisted of four production units using blast furnace processing technology with a production capacity of 550,000 tons per year. The Isfahan steel plant (Aryamehr Steel Mill, later called Ḏawb-āhan-e Eṣfahān) was commissioned, and its cast iron department came into operation in 1971. At that time, a contract for the expansion of the Isfahan steel plant to a capacity of 1.9 million tons per year of structural steel was signed with the USSR. Work started in 1973, but due to political and economic upheaval the plant was not completed until 1983. The private-sector Iran National Steel Industries Group (INSIG, Goruh-e Melli-ye Ṣanʿati-ye Fulād-e Irān) erected a second 85,000 tons per year rolling mill (Šāhin), also at Ahvāz, in 1969, and ordered a third one (Šahyār, 120,000 tons per year) to produce structural steel by rolling imported, semi-finished steel products. Later the two plants were referred to as Navard Iran. INSIG also constructed a steelmaking shop (using an electric arc furnace [EAF] and continuous casting [CC] technology) to produce semis by melting steel scrap. Two other bloom plants for processing sponge iron (400,000 tons capacity) were erected in 1972 by the Šahriyār Industrial Group; they were nationalized after the Islamic revolution and are now managed by the National Iranian Steel Industries Company (NISCO). The Ahvāz complex supplies these two plants. Also built were the Ahvāz Rolling and Pipe Mills Company to produce 140,000 tons of skelp (steel shaped for pipe-making) per year and the Šahriyār Pipe Manufacturing Company to produce 80,000 tons per year of seamless and galvanized pipes (0.5-5 inches diameter), both in 1973. The problems encountered at the Isfahan steel plant and the private sector furnaces (shortage of scrap and quality coking coal) constrained the government’s policy to expand the country’s iron and steel industry to respond to growing domestic demand. The development of new methods of direct reduction processing technology provided a viable alternative for the government, given the fact that Iran had rich resources of natural gas and various required raw materials, in particular, iron ore. The resulted in the establishment of another state-owned company under the name of NISCO in the mid-1970s to produce iron and steel products by utilizing the direct reduction process, as well as to mobilize the relevant iron ore mines. To accomplish this, two contracts were signed between NISCO and a European-American consortium to construct two integrated steel mills in Bandar-e ʿAbbās (q.v.) and Ahvāz and a heavy rolling mill in Ahvāz. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, fundamental changes took place in the Iranian Steel Industry Organization. The two state-owned companies were merged, and NISCO was affiliated to the former Ministry of Mines and Metals, and the Ministry of Industries and Mines was established. NISCO now directs and supervises the Iranian steel industry from the exploration stage of its relevant raw materials up to the marketing of its products in domestic and international markets. As the largest state-owned steel company in the Middle East, NISCO ranked 26 in the table of the world’s major steel producing companies in 1999 and 2000. NISCO is also a regular member of the International Iron & Steel Institute. During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the steel industry development lost its impetus to some extent. Construction of the Ahvāz Steel Complex (Mojtameʿ-e Fulād-e Ahvāz) had been started in 1974 with a planned capacity of 2.35 million tons per year. Completion was scheduled for 1983, but was delayed by damage due to Iraqi air raids, and the plant cost 40 percent more than originally estimated. However, immediately after the cease-fire and implementation of the First and Second Five-Year Development Plans of the country, the steel industry achieved a considerable growth. In 1988, the volume of steel production did not exceed an annual one million tons. However, it reached 6.3 million tons in 1999 and 6.6 million tons in 2000. This was due to the completion of old projects and the implementation of new ones. Of the old projects the most notable was the Ahvāz Steel Complex, which is built 12 km from Ahvāz on a terrain of 300 ha. The first of the plants was ready for operation in 1989 with a capacity of 550,00 tons per year. Its 150 x 150 mm steel ingots are supplied to NISC, which transforms them into beams and round bars. The second and third phases (two furnaces and a casting unit) of the Ahvāz Steel Complex were completed by 1989 and 1990, respectively, with a production capacity of 1.6 million tons per year; this output is converted into sheets by the Kāviān heavy rolling project (Nāvard-e Sangin-e Kāviyān), which is part of the Ahvāz steel complex. Work had started on the Kāviān plant in 1976, and it was completed (with delays) in 1989. Its output consists of 400,000 8-40 mm sheets and 300,000 tons of slabs, while it also converts slabs into billets and blooms using the hot rolling method. At Ahvāz there is also the Nasr Steel Mill (Fulād-e Naṣr), which produced 125,000 tons of steel billets in 1988. Its design capacity is 360,000 tons. The Khuzestan Steel Production Complex produced 1,698,000 tons of steel in 2002-03, hitting a record in its annual production. The complex was to produce almost two million tons of steel in 2003-04. Khuzestan Steel Co. (KSC) actually consists of three companies (Ahvāz Steel Complex, INSIG, and Kāviān), but in early 1994 NISCO, the mother company, decided to integrate them into one company to better compete in the world market. Further upgrades and expansion also took place at the Isfahan Steel Mill in 1989 when the Italians completed two continuous casting units. One of the first new projects was the construction of the Iran Alloy Steel Plant (Fulādhā-ye Alyāji-ye Irān) at Yazd, which started in 1988 and became operational in 1998. It has a production capacity of 120,000 tons of alloy steel sections and 20,000 tons of alloy steel ingots. The capacity may be raised to 200,000 tons later. (For details about its plant configuration and other particulars see Internet Resource 4). Another new project was the Mobarakeh Steel Complex (Mojtameʿ-e Fulād-e Mobāraka), which is the biggest industrial project in Iran. It has been built by an Italian consortium and is located on 35 sq. km of land and has 28 associated plants as well as a number of non-associated ones. Originally it was planned to be built at Bandar-e ʿAbbās, but it was decided to build 75 km to the southwest of Isfahan to be closer to the Čādormalu coal mines, which added much to the cost of its final products. The Mobarakeh Steel Company is affiliated to NISCO and is also the first integrated flat steel production plant in the Islamic Republic of Iran based on DRI [“direct reduced iron” oxidation]-EAF-CC technology. The plant became operational in late 1992 with a projected production capacity of 2,935 million tons of liquid steel per year. The current capacity is estimated at 2.8 million tons per year. Expansion of the plant to an annual capacity of 4.1 million tons is under way. The expansion contract was signed between Iran and three Italian companies on a buy-back basis. (For details about the complex. see Internet Source 1; for the steel plants of Iran in general, see Internet Source 6). INSIG (as noted above, part of KSC) also initiated the construction of new capacity such as a bar rolling mill financed by the Italian steel corporation Danieli with a capacity of 550,000 tons of bars on a yearly basis. It also intends to reconstruct its casting and melting shops to increase production to 470,000 tons of crude steel when financing has been secured. INSIG is situated on the Ahvāz-Ḵorramšahr road and was nationalized after the revolution. It has seven plants in five sections, including three rolling mills, the first of which started operating in 1967. The INSIG group produces knurled and plain bars, drawn wires, iron beams, angle irons and belt in section 2. Steel and steel girders are made in section 3, while section 4 has two galvanized and non-galvanized pipe-making units (70,000 and 120,000 tons capacity, respectively). The necessary machines are assembled in section 5. The Isfahan Steel plant will add new capacity to produce some 3.6 million tons of crude steel. The Saba Steel Complex, near Isfahan, which has been designed and constructed by Isfahan Steel Mill, adds a total of 700,000 tons of steel sheets to the country’s annual production. The Khorasan Steel Complex in Nishapur (51 percent privately owned, 49 percent Isfahan Steel) with an annual capacity is 550,000 tons became operational in 2002. Its capacity will be increased with a sponge iron plant and capacity will be increased to 1.3 million tons. The Meybod Steel Project has a capacity of 300,000 of cast iron per year. The Zagros Steel Project in Kurdistan province has a capacity of 70,000 tons of cast iron per year. It is planned to add an agglomeration plant later. The Hormozegan Steel Project has a planned capacity of 1.5 million tons of crude steel. Hormozgan Steel Complex signed two contracts in January 2003. A contract worth USD 300-400 million, for the construction of a 1.5 million-tons-per-year slab and lime calcining plant, was signed with a consortium of Germany’s SMS Demag AG, Iran International Engineering Company (IRITEC) and its subsidiary registered in Italy, Irasco. The estimated USD 140 million contract for the setting up of a 1.65-million-tons-per-year direct reduction iron facility was signed by Germany-registered Mines & Metals Engineering GmhH (MME). NISCO will be the operator of the plant. Financing will be arranged on a buy-back basis, with a structure similar to the one used for the expansion of the Mobarakeh Steel Complex. The buy-back agreement will cover both the project’s international and local content (see Internet Source 5). To sustain the expansion plans of the steel industry (in particular at Isfahan Steel and Mobarakeh Steel), the ongoing Bandar-e ʿAbbās Jetty project will enable the handling of 5 million tons per year of minerals at the port, allowing the docking of ships with a capacity up to 150,000 tons. Likewise the Bandar Imam Jetty project enables the handling of 5 million tons per year of iron ore at the Khuzestan Steel Complex. Ships with a capacity of 60,000 tons can dock of the jetty, while further dredging will allow docking of ships of 100,000 tons. Not only port access and capacity are important for Iran’s steel industry, but also the railway system. According to the Ministry of Industries and Mines, 50 per cent of total railway capacity was allocated to transporting the output of the National Steel Company in 2000, and with planned increase of steel production capacity more demand will be made on rail capacity. World steel production in 2000 reached 850 million tons, of which Iran’s share was 6.7 million tons; Iran then ranked twenty-third among steel-producing countries, and twenty-first in 2004 (see International Iron and Steel Institute for the respective years). NISCO reported that the annual production of steel in Iran for 1382 (2003/04) was estimated at 8.13 million tons—the first time that Iran’s steel production would surpass eight million tons. This meant that Iran was able to satisfy 70 percent of domestic demand, while at the same time exporting some 1.5 million tons of steel. Exports constitute a small part of the output of the steel and other metal industries. Only ingots and some aluminum was exported and amounted to less than 1 percent of total exports in 1999. As to imports, except for universals, plates, and sheets (UN International Trade Centre, no. 674), tubes, pipes and fittings (678), and bars, rods, shapes, sections (673) all imports were less than 1 percent of total imports (see numbers for recent years, Internet Source 3). The location of the Mobarakeh plant at Isfahan rather than near Bandar-e ʿAbbās constrains its export capacity due to high transportation cost. Investments are ongoing to expand the capacity up to 14.7 and later to 18.4 million tons per year. NISCO has also taken steps toward upgrading the quality of its products and improving the management system with due consideration to environmental protection and better working conditions (NISCO-Iran; see Internet Source 5). Iran was scheduled to produce some 8.1 million tons of steel and 7.6 million tons of steel slabs in 2003. In 2002, about 7.5 million tons of steel, as well as 7.5 tons of steel slabs were produced in the country, so the country is capable of producing steel and steel slabs in equal amounts. However, the domestic consumption of steel was as high as 11 million tons in 2002, which meant that more than 3.5 million tons of steel were imported. The domestic consumption of steel for 2003 was predicted to be some 12 million tons, which is likely to increase with a boom in the construction sector. This is because, unlike many countries in the world which use concrete and bars, Iran uses iron slates in construction, which also adds to the instability of its buildings. Despite all, Iran managed to export 1.5 million tons of steel products in 2002. Iran’s steel is capable of competing with European products due to its quality and price. The only issue obstructing its path to more exports is domestic demand that outweighs production. The prospects of Iran’s steel industry seem favorable due to its large and rich raw material resource base, its rich and cheap energy resources, human capital and technical know-how (as to the latter see Noorbakhsh, pp. 33-58). Iran not only added new capacity during the last 20 years that significantly reduced the country’s import bill and even made export of steel products possible, but it also developed its own technological capacity. Iran, for example, developed its own direct reactivation method of producing iron with 96 percent “metallization,” which works more effectively than the three other conventional methods. The method has been patented and licensed to an Italian company. The Isfahan Steel complex also has been developing innovative techniques of producing spongy iron, manufacturing macro-weighty crafts, etc. Takado Company was established as an investment company and was an affiliate of Isfahan Steel. It started operating with personnel from Isfahan Steel, and after a decade it became one of the largest investment companies in the steel industry. It consists now of 13 companies and has 25 affiliated companies, and it is involved in most aspect of the steel industry (Internet Source 8). Bibliography: Echo of Iran, Iran Almanac, Tehran, 1961-77. Laurence Paul Elwell-Sutton, Modern Iran, London, 1941. Willem Floor, Industrialization in Iran, 1900-1941, Durham Occasion Papers 23, Durham, England, 1984. Raj Narain Gupta, Iran. An Economic Study, New Delhi, 1947. Iran Yearbook, Bonn, 1989-90. Hans-Joachim Koellner, “Die Grundlagen der Industrialisierung Irans unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der wichtigsten iranischen Industriezweige,” Ph.D. diss., Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 1949. Farhad Noorbakhsh (with H. Labbaf, F. Analuoi and J. Cusworth), “Senior Manager’s Effectiveness and their Required Categories of Managerial Skills: The Case of the Steel Industry in Iran,” in F. Analoui, ed., Effective Human Resource Development: A Challenge for Developing Countries, Aldershot, UK, 1999, pp. 33-58. Overseas Consultants, Report on the Seven Year Development Plan for the Plan Organization, 5 vols., New York, 1949. N. S. Roberts, Iran. Economic and Commercial Conditions, London, 1948. [UNIDO] United Nations Industrial Development Organization, Economist Intelligence Unit, Islamic Republic of Iran. Industrial Revitalization, Vienna, 1995. Idem, Islamic Republic of Iran. Industrial Sector Survey on the Potential for Non-oil Manufactured Exports, Vienna, 1999. ʿAli Zāhedi, Ṣanāyeʿ-e Irān baʿd az jang, Tehran, 1945.Internet sources. 1. “Esfahan’s Mobarakeh Steel Company,” at:http://www.mobarakeh-steel.ir (in Persian)2. International Iron and Steel Institute, select “Steel in Figures” to search for world production in various years, at: www.worldsteel.org.3. International Trade Centre, “International Trade Statistics,” at: http://www.intracen.org/tradstat/sitc3-3d/ir364.htm4. “Iran Alloy Steel Company,” at:http://www.iranalloysteel.com/abfra.htm5. “Iran: Steel Industry Overview,” at: http://www.mesteel.com/countries/iran/overview.htm6. “Iransteel.net,” at:http://www.iransteel.net/e-iransteel.htm7. “MEsteel,” at:http://www.mesteel.com/cgi-bin/w3-msql/goto.htm8. “Takado,” at:www.takado.ir/En.

Another idea for my home page's text is notifying visitors about the enhancements I put on my site. For example, I want visitors to sign my guestbook or fill out my survey Form E-mailer to answer questions about my site, my business, or my site's topic.

Need some extra help building your site? Here are some topics that may be helpful.

• Design Web Site
• Games
• Photos
• Video

I might not want a large amount of text on my home page if I want to guide visitors toward my other pages. Instead of text, I can add photos or interesting links. One of the first things I would want to do is choose a template that reflects what my site is all about. Colors and themes are a great way to reinforce the message and purpose of my site.

Even if I don't put much text on my home page, it's a good idea to include hidden tools that will help me promote my site, so people other than my friends and family actually see it. For example, I could add meta tags, which are hidden codes that allow search engines to find my site. I could also install stats and a counter so I know how many people are visiting. If not many are visiting, submitting my site to search engines will guide more traffic to my site.