Objective
Most of the gases emitted by the iron- and steel-making industry are collected and treated before their release into the atmosphere. There still exist, however, several emission sources for which treatment is lacking or not satisfactory. Among them, fugitive emissions are specially important. They may occur at coke ovens, sinter plants, blast furnaces, steel converters and/or teeming, casting and rolling plants. These emissions are dangerous because they contain toxic gases such as inorganic ones and, of more specific interest for us, volatile organic compounds (VOCs). They represent a hazard for the environment as well as for human health. Although great progress has been made in capturing fugitive emissions, and technologies for eliminating components such as particulates and sulfur dioxide are available, treatments for the abatement of VOCs from such effluents at reasonable cost are lacking. In view of an increasingly deeper control of the atmospheric pollution, required both socially and by the ever more restrictive environmental regulations, it is necessary to treat them using well adapted new "end-of-pipe" processes.
The main objective of the present Research Project is to find the bases of an original process for the abatement of VOC gaseous emissions from the iron- and steel-making industry, especially those coming from fugitive emissions. The future process will be based on catalytic deep oxidation, overcoming the drawbacks of currently applied technologies. The project can be divided in the following tasks.
1. Design and preparation of oxide catalysts for the deep
oxidation of VOCs, specially resistant to poison molecules. The successful catalyst will have to achieve 95+% VOC destruction efficiency and to resist to the specific conditions of the gases generated by the iron- and steel-making industry: presence of many different organic and inorganic molecules, that can act as poisons for catalysts or strongly modify rates of reaction and resistance to deactivation, and fluctuations in time of the gas stream composition due to the discontinuous character of many operations in the iron-and steel-making process.
2. Test of these specially designed new catalysts
and study of their activity (including kinetics), ageing, regeneration and resistance to both poisons and steam. Comparison with available commercial catalysts.
3. Modeling of VOC destruction under various operating conditions and various types and relative amounts of inorganic molecules or steam.
4. Design of energy-efficient reactors for the treatment of such emissions with minimum energy consumption.
5. Design of a bench-scale reactor for testing catalysts on real industrial effluent streams.
As a final result of the
Research Project, data on the performance of catalysts in a bench-scale reactor under optimized operating parameters will be obtained for the treatment of industrial gaseous effluents.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
33071 OVIEDO
Spain