The smelting of calcium carbide (as also of standard ferromanganese) has always been plagued by explosions and eruptions, too often with serious injuries and even with loss of life such as that of the engineer who was taking a short-cut past a carbide furnace in Niagara in 1963 just when it erupted, killing him instantly; and two cases in South Africa in the 1980s, where two men were burnt during an eruption, and one while tapping a furnace, all dying within three days. At that time, the writer was engaged on a study of eruptions in a ferromanganese furnace, where it appeared that these resulted from insufficient preheating of the mix, so that the furnace produced manganese vapour, which, on condensing and reacting in the mix, could supply the needed energy. He then turned to a study of calcium carbide smelting, making a series of thermodynamic calculations and energy balances in an attempt to understand how this comes about, which was submitted to the South African Journal of Mining and Metallurgy in 1994. He had offered a paper on this subject to the Electric Furnace Conference in 1992 and 1993, which was rejected, but was accepted and was published as 'Carbide Smelting without Eruptions in November 1994 and will appear in the Proceedings. The first reference in it is to the South African paper, and many of the criticisms of the reviewers were included. Now the present revision adds further changes and, it is hoped, improvements.
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