Sources of manganese ore generally also contain iron oxides. As manganese is harder to reduce than iron, during the reduction of manganese ore, iron is also reduced and mixed with the manganese in the melt, unlike other oxides such as SiO, AlO and CaO.
Reduction is achieved using a submerged arc furnance. There are two main industrial procedures to perform the reduction, the discard slag method (or flux method) and the duplex method (or fluxless method). Despite the name, the differences in the method are not in the addition of flux, but rather in the number of stages required. In the flux method, basic fluxes such as CaO are added in order to electrolytically reduce the manganese ore:
The remaining slag after the reduction process has approximately 15-20% manganese content, which is usually discarded.
In the fluxless method, carbon reduction is also used in the first stage, but the fluxes added do not necessarily increase the activity of the manganese. As a result, the remaining slag has a concentration of 30% to 50% of the manganese. This is then reprocessed with quartzite to make silicomanganese alloys. The resultant discarded slag has a manganese content of less than 5%, increasing the yield. As a result, this method is used more often in industry.
In both methods, due to the addition of carbon as an reducing agent, the alloy produced is referred to as high-carbon ferromanganese (HCFM), with a carbon content of up to 6%.
A correct mix of coke, flux and ore composition is required to give high yield and reliable furnance operation, by achieving the desired chemical properties, viscosity and smelting temperature in the resulting melt. Since the iron to manganese ratio of natural manganese sources vary greatly, mixing ores from several sources is sometimes done to give a certain desired ratio.
In the manufacture of steel, low-carbon ferromanganese (LCFM) is preferred due to the ability to accurately control the amount of carbon in the resultant steel. To arrive at LCFM from HCFM, there are also two main methods: silicothermal reduction and oxygen refinement.
In silicothermal reduction, silicomanganese from the second step of the duplex process is used as a reductant. After a variety of mixing and meting steps to reduce the silicon content, a low-carbon allow with less than 0.8% carbon and 1% silicon by weight can be obtained.
In the oxygen refinement method, HCFM is melted and heated to a high temperature of . Oxygen is then blown in to oxidise the carbon into CO and CO. The disadvantage of this process is that the metal is also oxidised at these high temperatures. Manganese oxide collects mainly in the form of MnO in the dust blown out from the crucible.