Project description
Recovering important metals from low-grade ores and waste
Solutions for sustainable mineral and metallurgical waste management are more than ever required. The EU-funded HEPHAESTUS aims to develop a set of scalable and tuneable unit operations to effectively treat waste derived from primary mining and metallurgical streams. The researchers will design units to transform the dust from the electric arc furnaces into metal alloys and recover zinc from this dust. Other units will be responsible for the catalytic conversion of CO2 gas into methanol or formic acid. The HEPHAESTUS small-scale units will be able to treat around 10 000 tonnes of waste dust per year. Prototype demonstrations will take place in Greece and Italy.
Objective
The HEPHAESTUS project is built around one key, overarching objective:
To develop a set of scalable and tuneable unit operations, to be built as integrated processing plant, featuring the capacity to treat multiple process wastes deriving from primary mineral and metallurgical (primary and secondary) streams. The unit operations are:
- Clean-Tech electric furnace, to transform the EAF and AOD dust into metal alloy to be immediately remelted, process supported with streams of fines by-products from the mineral primary extractions (construction, aggregates and dimensional stone)
- EZINEX process, to extract the zinc present in the dust of the furnace
- Fibre drawing, for mineral wool manufacturing out of the process slag in molten state
- Catalytic conversion of CO2 gas into methanol or formic acid
- Ammonia-ammonium carbonate (AAC) and methanesulfonic acid (MSA) based hydrometallurgical processes, to produce a recyclable Fe-rich residue and to recover metals (e.g.e.g. ZnS) from EAF dust
The project is targeting primarily small-scale applications (order of magnitude 10 k tons waste dust per year), to cope with the typically fragmented European process size. Such scale is matching the waste volumes and differentiation and granting positive environmental AND economic sustainability through the valorisation of different streams of by-products at low operational and capital expenditure, ensuring vast replicability and short ROI
Project will be demonstrated in two pilot applications, in Greece and Italy, with the purpose of creating awareness on the business potential and to generate the conditions for a long-term exploitation, leading to meaningful reduction of wastes for the extractive and steel industries.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistryinorganic compounds
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrytransition metals
- natural scienceschemical sciencesorganic chemistryalcohols
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Keywords
Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-01
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-IA - HORIZON Innovation ActionsCoordinator
16129 Genova
Italy