Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header
Content archived on 2022-11-21

On-line zinc analysis of hot converter exhaust gas

Objective



The growing use of zinc-coated steel sheet in a variety of sectors (motor industry, consumer durables and construction industry) has led to an increase in the zinc content of home scrap, a large proportion of which is recycled in L-D steelworks. From a metallurgical point of view, the Zn coating of the scrap does not interfere with the steel production process, nor does it normally affect product quality. However, the zinc does accumulate in the process dusts.

Despite their high iron content, typically around 60%, these dusts cannot be recycled in the sintering plant or the blast furnace because of the zinc load without additional, usually complicated processing stages, above all owing to the risk of scaling in the blast furnace. On the other hand, the typical zinc content of these dusts of 2% is too low to be recycled in zinc foundries. From the purely economic point of view, this currently requires Zn concentrations of well above 30%.

If the dusts and slurries from the waste gas cleaning system of an L-D converter are to be recycled internally, the zinc load must be reduced to a level that will not damage the blast furnace. The main source of the zinc in the dusts from waste gas purification is the scrap used in the converter, the Zn content of which can vary considerably. Some types of scrap are practically zinc-free, eg the uncoated process scrap or comparable new scrap. However, a large proportion of the scrap used, with the exception of the internal scrap arising in the finishing plants, has an unknown zinc content. This is particularly true of capital scrap.

A knowledge of the Zn load per converter batch would basically make it possible to identify and hive off dusts and slurries suitable for the blast furnace. This would permit separation of recyclable and non-recyclable dust fractions, which would reduce the amount of material to be landfilled or processed separately. While it is in principle technically possible to study the Zn content of metal in the scrap industry, the information would not normally be very useful, as it is practically impossible to take a representative sample in normal scrap handling practice.

A way must therefore be found of reliably quantifying the zinc stream from the converter, in order to be able to determine the zinc load of the dusts and slurries from waste gas purification. The evaporation behaviour of zinc can be harnessed for this purpose, as dusts highly contaminated with zinc are driven off as soon as pig iron is poured over the scrap, or during the following first minutes of blowing, so that a reliable zinc analysis should be possible. The task is to develop a method of detecting zinc in the flue dust of the converter deduster. The objective is to measure the Zn content above a threshold value reliably throughout the process, in order to use this information to separate low-zinc from high-zinc dust fractions.

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

Data not available

Funding Scheme

Data not available

Coordinator

Krupp Hoesch Stahl AG
EU contribution
No data
Address
Rheinische Straße 173
44147 Dortmund
Germany

See on map

Total cost
No data