Ironsand, also known as iron-sand or iron sand, is a type of sand with heavy concentrations of iron. Ironsand has a tendency to heat up in direct sunlight, causing temperatures high enough to cause minor burns. In the modern age ironsand is placer mined along China’s southeast coast and used for smelting steel.
About Ironsand in brief
Ironsand, also known as iron-sand or iron sand, is a type of sand with heavy concentrations of iron. It is composed mainly of magnetite, Fe3O4, and also contains small amounts of titanium, silica, manganese, calcium and vanadium. Ironsand has a tendency to heat up in direct sunlight, causing temperatures high enough to cause minor burns. As such it forms a hazard in New Zealand at popular west-coast surf beaches such as Piha. In the modern age ironsand is placer mined along China’s southeast coast and used for smelting steel. The typical composition of this iron is 48.5% metallic iron, 84% silica,. 232% phosphorus and 0.52% sulfur. In Indonesia, the iron, 052% iron, is prevalent on the south coast of Java island. Mining was not practiced in Japan until the 7th or 8th centuries. Prior to this, all metals were imported into Japan from China and Korea. Deposits of iron were scarce in Japan, so, around the 8th century, iron-making technology was developed with the use of the raw iron sand.
Because of the loose nature of the sand it was difficult to use in a normal blast furnace to make pig iron, so an open-topped bloomery called tara tara was built with a tara bloomery or tara-tara bloomer. The tara Bloomer was built in Japan and used to smelter pig iron in a blast furnace called a tatara bloomers. It was also used in Japan to smelt pig iron for the first time in the early 20th century. In Japan, the taraBloomer is still used today for the production of pig iron and other iron-based products. The iron sand is found worldwide and is usually mixed with other types of sand that washes downriver or ashore from mountainous or underwater deposits. In some areas the sand may contain mostly quartz, while in others it may be made primarily from volcanic rock such as basalt, depending on the types of minerals along the water’s path. The sand is typically picked up along the way from beds, veins, or inclusions of magnetites and washed downstream or along the currents.
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This page is based on the article Ironsand published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 24, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
