Looking for "kish graphite"

You may wish sto check out the following . . .
Carl

Your best chance, in Canada, would be Dofasco, in Hamilton. They'd probably just give it to you. It occurs, mostly, when molten pig iron is poured from one vessel into another. Its composition is mainly carbon (graphite) with some silicon (not silica). This material precipitates from the molten iron as its temperature drops. The kish is very light, & a 4-5 kg sample will occupy a fairly large volume. may take a while to accumulate.

Hi Alain,
If you find some grab a bunch of it and put some on ebay. I'd like to see what this stuff is like. I collect odd materials.
Cheers, Scott Yannitell

Separating the graphite from the rest of the steel plant dust would be a pain although not too hard in bulk if there was money in it. If you are investigating a potential use for large quantities of dust contact your nearest steel works with a blast furnace / oxygen steel plant and ask them for a sample I would have thought they would send you a sample of raw dust.

Kish graphite isn't dust - the whole point about it is that it's grown by some weird form of randomly occuring epitaxy. I've only seen it in crystallography labs.
It grows in chunks that can be large (maybe kilogrammes), but the interesting part of it with the consistent crystal structure is only a few grammes.

It appears there are two related things called Kish graphite.
This is what I call kish graphite:-
"The hot metal is immediately poured directly onto the scrap from a transfer ladle. Fumes and kish (graphite flakes from the carbon saturated hot metal) are emitted from the vessel's mouth and collected by the pollution control system"
"The large flakes of type C flake graphite are typical of kish graphite that is formed in hypereutectic irons. These large flakes enhance resistance to thermal shock by increasing thermal conductivity and decreasing elastic modulus. On the other hand, large flakes are not conducive to good surface finishes on machined parts or to high strength or good impact resistance. "
"Past research on the technical feasibility of recovering high-quality flake graphite from steelmaking kish may further
boost graphite recycling efforts under favorable economic conditions.2 Abundance of graphite in the world market and
continuing low prices, however, inhibit increased recycling efforts. Information on the quantity and value of recycled
graphite is not available."

I'm curious about the etymology of "kish". It sounds like some old Anglo-Saxon word.
We don't have many of those in the computer business. Most of our older terms such as "file", "record", "field", etc. are inherited from the punched card business. And most of the people working in computers today are completely unaware of this history.
Every now and then I stumble across older words in books on ceramics and metals like "cullet", "grog", "smalts", "lemel", etc.

OED :- origin uncertain, first noted 1800-1830. Not much help.