Ideal intrinsic extensions with connections to PI-rings

In this paper, we extend various classical results by Armendariz and Steinberg, Fisher, Kaplansky, Martindale, Posner, and Rowen on semiprime PI-rings. We do this by introducing several new generalizations of the class of semiprime PI-rings. For these new classes, some structure theorems are obtained, and connections to arbitrary semiprime rings are made (e.g., a semiprime ring has a largest essentially closed ideal from some of these classes). Numerous examples are provided to illustrate and delimit our results.