Molten steel

One of my life’s little pleasures is a text-MUD I’ve been playing in for some time, Inferno. One of the reasons I like it is because you don’t have to kill anything to make a living; my character, for example, is a weaponsmith. Wanting to bone up a bit for verisimilitude, I did a lot of Google-searching for things blacksmithing and learned enough to sound like I know what I’m talking about in the game.

Now, blacksmiths don’t really melt steel, they simply heat it to the point where it is more or less pliable – one smith-poet had the phrase “it moves like clay between the hammer and the anvil” – and forge it into shape. Steel is for the main part an alloy of iron and carbon and even if it’s bound with iron, the carbon burns just fine. More than one site mentioned setting their work on fire when it was left too long in the fire. Apparently it’s quite spectacular.

Yet we’ve all seen pictures and movies/videos of steel mills with their hearths being tapped and incandescent metal flowing out like water into ladles to be transported somewhere else for further processing. Can any metallurgists out there explain why a smith has to worry about his billet catching fire yet a producer can heat the stuff to where it runs? Does the carbon burn during processing* then stop as the mass cools? Or is there something esoteric I’m missing?

*I’m not talking the step in the process where a lance is lowered into the mass and oxygen blown through it. Obviously the carbon here is being burned deliberately.

In a blacksmith forge you have forced air from a bellows or fan. This suppies enough oxygen to make the steel burn.
A cutting torch works the same. Heat steel red hot, hit the paddle which feeds in more oxygen, and you are cutting (burning away) steel.

Note, by the way, that iron can also burn, not just carbon, though in practice you need something with a lot of surface area for it to happen (steel wool, for instance).

Professional steel mills, at least here in Gary, Indiana, often produce steel in either low or oxygen free environments, which makes burning anything difficult. My source on that are mill workers The mills do, occasionally, have fatalities when workers are accidentally asphyxiated due to low oxygen.

I think that its call OXIDIZE.

Yes, burning is a form of oxidation. In particular, oxidation is often called “burning” if it occurs quickly and exothermically, which can in fact happen with iron.