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Behavior of Chromium, Nickel, Lead, Zinc, Cadmium, and Mercury in the Blast FurnaceA Critical Review of Literature Data and Plant Investigations
journal contribution
posted on 2015-12-02, 00:00 authored by Verena Trinkel, Ole Mallow, Christoph Thaler, Johannes Schenk, Helmut Rechberger, Johann FellnerBlast
furnaces have a huge turnover of materials. Besides the transformation
of the main elements iron and carbon, a large variety of other elements
(present at low concentrations in different input materials) are undesirably
inserted into blast furnaces. Heavy metals, such as chromium, nickel,
lead, zinc, cadmium, and mercury, belong to these unwanted elements
that are inserted. In the present paper, the behavior of these heavy
metals in the blast furnace process has been investigated in detail,
since they may influence the quality of the product, the byproduct,
the process stability, and the environmental impact of hot metal production
(e.g., emissions of heavy metals). Thereto, a detailed literature
review has been carried out and its results have been subsequently
compared with long-term investigations (over 3 years) conducted at
an Austrian blast furnace. The results of the study indicate that
nickel and chromium are very affine to the hot metal and thus to a
large extent (>84%) transferred into it. Contrary to this, mercury
and cadmium are mainly discharged via the top gas dust (>87%) and
thus accumulate in the residues of the top gas cleaning system. For
zinc and lead, no main discharge route could be detected. The results
for lead and zinc varied considerably, which indicates the dependency
of their transformation on the process conditions.