Flash-Smelting at Ashio Smelter

After the war it was necessary to reconstruct the time-worn copper blast furnace and its appendixes at Ashio smelter and so an experimental researches on the electric smelting of copper ores in place of the blast furnace smelter was begun in 1949. We had an information by chance that the flash smelting in place of the electric furnace smelting at Harjavalta in Finland was succesfully in operation. Author went to see it to Finland and convinced that it would be better than the electric furnace operations.The Furukawa Mining Co. decided to adopt the flash smelting and to construct the flash smelting plant and the sulfuric acid plant to make use the waste gas . The construction of the plant completed in March 1956. The capacity of the furnace is 8ton of ores per hour and the capacity of the acid plant is 200ton of sulfuric acid per day.