A Shaft Furnace Line for Producing Oxygen-Free Copper for Electron Devices Applications

In recent years the level of environmental awareness has been rising world-wide, with increased emphasis being placed on measures to stop global warming and energy-saving initiatives, but these have been largely ineffective. In this work we present a shaft furnace as a replacement for induction furnaces in the melting of oxygen-free copper, and it has been possible, using this shaft furnace line, to produce oxygen-free copper that exceeds both the JIS standard for use in electron devices applications and the ASTM Grade 1 standard. We also succeeded in achieving an energy saving of approximately 10 % in terms of primary crude oil equivalence units. ABSTRACT