The steel industry has existed for over hundreds of years, but it was not commercialized until the 19th century. Today, in applications such as metalworking and foundries, operations in these special environments can be executed remotely and safely.

Nowadays, there are two major commercial processes for making steel, namely basic oxygen steelmaking, which has liquid pig-iron from the blast furnace and scrap steel as the main feed materials, and electric arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking, which uses scrap steel or direct reduced iron (DRI) as the main feed materials. Oxygen steelmaking is fuelled predominantly by the exothermic nature of the reactions inside the vessel where as in EAF steelmaking, electrical energy is used to melt the solid scrap and/or DRI materials. In recent times, EAF steelmaking technology has evolved closer to oxygen steelmaking as more chemical energy is introduced into the process.

Both are extremely dangerous situations for workers and thanks to elebia they will no longer need to be near the steelmaking process. The elebia automatic hook can be optimised for special environments like foundries with it’s heat shield.

The same occurs with foundries; A foundry is a factory that produces metal castings. Casting involves pouring liquid metal into a mold, which contains a hollow cavity of the desired shape, and then allowing it to cool and solidify. The solidified part is also known as a casting, which is ejected or broken out of the mold to complete the process.