Electric Arc Furnace (Late-Game Steel Production)
Shoes
Electric arc furnaces (EAFs) are becoming more ubiquitous, as they allow steel production using less energy and releasing fewer greenhouse gases than the traditional blast furnaces. This could be an interesting alternative source of Steel Bars in the late game (after unlocking Industry).
EAFs cannot produce steel directly from iron ore (iron concentrate) but instead typically use scrap metal or pre-reduced iron from a bloomery. This could give us a recipe like 4 Iron Bars + 2 Quicklime + 4 Charcoal Powder = 4 Steel Bars (improved by Modern Upgrades). While this recipe is more complicated, it is also cheaper, providing a late-game method for mass-producing Steel Bars/Rebar/Corrugated Steel for large construction projects.
The EAF could also have the ability to melt down broken tools/parts into Iron Bars, providing a late-game way to recycle them rather than throwing them in a landfill.
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Dennis Scholz
Merged in a post:
Electric Arc Furnace (EAF)
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MasterXtistis
I think an Arc Furnace should be added to ECO as the successor to the Blast Furnace for smelting and recycling metals.
As the name suggests, this would be a power hungry machine and it would also be slightly faster at smelting than the Blast Furnace is and be more efficient.
This would be made by the Industry profession and would require 3 Graphite Electrodes to serve as the main parts. These would be made from coal heated in a Blast Furnace. The rest of the parts would be Bricks, Steel components, some Steel pipes and some other mechanical parts as well as an electronic part.
The effeciency of the Arc Furnace would be most apparent in Iron and Steel smelting, whereas smelting Copper or Gold wouldn't yield the same ratio compared to the Blast Furnace. Unlike the Blast Furnace, making steel here would use iron bars instead with alternative recipes that use scraps from melting down parts.
The Arc Furnace would make around 4 times less CO2, but would produce an equal amount of slag to the Blast Furnace.* The biggest drawbacks to the Arc Furnace are that it would use 4000w and would need the Graphite Electrodes to be replaced more often than it's other parts. The machine would also have a water input and sewage output for cooling.
One of the best reasons for an Arc Furnace would be its ability to quickly recycle metal components. For example, an Iron wheel could give back a certain amount of iron scrap back. Or a set amount of Gold Wiring would return Gold scraps. You would also be able to melt down tools for scraps of that metal. Of which these scraps can be reused in making the metal.
*An actual Arc Furnace would produce a toxic slag called EAF slag. I decided not to include it in the main explanation as it might seem to extreme for ECO considering how tailings already exist and this machine already creates enough pollutants. Although this can be considered for realism.
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MasterXtistis
In addition to this, a DC Electric Arc Furnace could be added as an alternative to the AC EAF shown in the main post.
These would use only two electrodes (one at the top and one on the bottom) and require less energy input, whilst making less emissions and slag.
The downsides to this compared to the AC EAF is how these would make less metal per cycle (still the same recipe ratios) and are more expensive to make and maintain.
The advantages to this would be how it is more efficient at smelting copper and gold, although the iron and steel efficiency doesn't change, these machines would also be faster than the AC EAFs.
As for some numbers, the DC EAFs would use 2000w of electrical energy and make around a third of the CO2 emissions.