In the second edition of “Modern Blast Furnace Ironmaking”, we have included our insights gained during numerous discussions with colleagues all over the world and our own internal core team. We have also greatly benefited from the many courses and questions raised by the participants in these courses.

The objective of this book is to share our insights that optimization of the blast furnace is not only based on “best practice transfer”, but also requires conceptual understanding why a measure works well in some cases and does not work in other situations. In other words, operational improvement is not only based on know–how, but on know–why as well.

We are indebted to many people we have worked with. We are grateful for the contributions of Renard Chaigneau, Tim Vander and Jennifer Wise, who re–wrote chapters III, IV and X respectively. Ing. Oscar Lingiardi, Prof. Dr. Fernando Tadeu Pereira de Medeiros, Prof. Dr. I. Kurunov and Ing. Vincenzo Dimastromatteo have given us valuable comment and taken care of translations into Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Italian. A special word of thanks to John Ricketts, who helped develop the material covered in the first edition of this book into a blast furnace operator course, has helped enormously with teaching materials and has shared his insights with us for more than 15 years.

Danieli Corus directors Mr. P. Zonneveld and previously N. Bleijendaal encouraged us to write the first and second edition of this book. We thank Edo Engel at XLmedia for the editing.

We learn by sharing our knowledge. We wish the same to our readers.

Maarten Geerdes, Hisko Toxopeus, Cor van der Vliet,

IJmuiden, July 2009