The History of Electrometallurgy: The First Ferroalloy Furnaces (On the Occasion of the 115th Anniversary of Ferroalloy Electrometallurgy in Russia)

On August 19, 1910, the first Russian ferroalloy plant based on electric furnaces had been officially opened. It was located in the Southern Urals, near the town of Satka. The Porogi Ferroalloy Plant belonged to the Ural Electrometallurgical Partnership of Count A.A. Mordvinov, Countess E.A. Mordvinova, Baron F.T. Ropp, and Engineer A.F. Schuppe. The smelting shop featured electric furnaces from Heroult, France. The furnaces were powered directly by a 560 kW hydroelectric generator with a 25 Hz alternating current, according to a circuit with no transformer. An annual smelting amount of 255–280 tons of ferrosilicon and 280–320 tons of carbonaceous ferrochromium was achieved, as well as other alloys were manufactured. Between 1931 and 1934, the first ferroalloy plants were built in Chelyabinsk, Zestafoni, and Zaporozhye, employing foreign specialists and imported electrical equipment. These plants were equipped with powerful electric furnaces of various designs. In Chelyabinsk, the capacity of the round furnaces for obtaining ferrosilicon and ferrochromium amounted to 7.8 MVA (Siemens-Schuckert, Germany). In Zaporozhye, the plant was equipped with Miguet 13.7 MVA furnaces (Miguet-Perron, France) for smelting ferrosilicon. In Zestafoni, the plant was equipped with 7.5 MVA furnaces with a rectangular bath (Siemens, Germany) for smelting manganese alloys.