Silicothermic reaction
Open-knowledge reference entry
Silicothermic reactions are thermic chemical reactions using silicon as the reducing agent at high temperature (800-1400°C).
They were initially commercialized for the production of low-carbon ferromanganese before and during World War I(F. M. Becket played a significant role) and are still used today. They were also historically used for the production of low-carbon ferrochrome, but were displaced by electric methods.
The most prominent example is the Pidgeon process (developed commercially in Canada during the Second World War by Lloyd Montgomery Pidgeon) for reducing magnesium metal from ores. Other processes include the Bolzano process and the magnetherm process. All three are commercially used for magnesium production.
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This entry incorporates text from “Silicothermic reaction” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.