Flywheel in the Blower Room of Völklingen Ironworks

Original photo taken at Völklingen Ironworks near Saarbrücken, Germany

The Völklingen Ironworks was a fully operational iron smelting plant for a hundred years before it was closed down in the 1980s. Now it is a UNESCO world heritage site and you can tour the entire plant. It is huge thrill for a someone who likes machines and learning about industry.

The flywheel is just a small piece of one of blowers that produced compressed air for the smelting furnaces. The smelting process requires blowing air through layers of burning coke (carbon from coal) and iron ore (iron oxide mined from the Earth). The carbon reacts with oxygen in the ore to produce carbon dioxide and metalic, liquid iron.

One of the interesting parts of the process is how the byproduct from one operation would become the feedstock for another operation. In this case, the fuel that drove the blowers was coal gas that was liberated from the coal as it was converted to coke.

Cheers,
Professor Bromide