The eutectic of iron and carbon (mixture with the minimum melting point) is 4.3% carbon by mass.
There's a chapter from Richard Preston's "American Steel" (a 1992 book that I highly recommend about the Nucor minimill in Crawfordsville, Indiana) where they find at one point during the startup of the then-cutting-edge continuous casting line that the steel in arc furnace had too little carbon. They decided to solve that (expensively, for the purpose of the testing) by dipping the electrodes into the steel and letting their ends dissolve.
The eutectic of iron and carbon (mixture with the minimum melting point) is 4.3% carbon by mass.
There's a chapter from Richard Preston's "American Steel" (a 1992 book that I highly recommend about the Nucor minimill in Crawfordsville, Indiana) where they find at one point during the startup of the then-cutting-edge continuous casting line that the steel in arc furnace had too little carbon. They decided to solve that (expensively, for the purpose of the testing) by dipping the electrodes into the steel and letting their ends dissolve.