The small and medium blast furnaces of less than 1000 m~3 in effective volume are nowadays producting about one half of the total amount of pig iron in the P.R. China. It is urgent to improve their economy and competitiveness in the domestic and world markets through technological modification. A comparison has been made between the operation of all coke and a super high PCI rate with the full oxygen blast furnace in terms of materials consumption and production cost. The ocmparison shows that the FOBF is not superior to the oxygen-enriched blast furnace operation with coal injection under the current price condition in China. Some important theoretical and technological issues related to the FOBF have been pointed out and briefly discussed, such as furnace productivity, coke rate limit, gas distribution control, CO_2 removal, design of charging and tapping equipments, furnace campaign life, etc. The FOBF can not become a realistic ironmaking profcess until all these problems are successfully solved.
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