Recovery of Iron and Zinc from Blast Furnace Dust Using Iron-Bath Reduction

Abstract The amount of dust produced from the blast furnace is very large, and this paper proposed a new method for comprehensive utilization of blast furnace dust. Firstly, cold bonded agglomerates directly put into the iron groove were made by blast furnace dust. The cold bonded agglomerates were reduced and melted by the energy of molten iron, and the valuable elements such as Fe reduced into molten iron and zinc existed in rich-Zn dust in the cold bonded agglomerates could be recovered. In order to simulate this process, the reduction behavior of cold bonded agglomerate in the iron bath was studied, and the reduction mechanism were analyzed by Factsage calculation and SEM-EDS. The results showed that: in the slag phase, there were small metallic iron particles dispersed and hard to gather. The main reason for this phenomenon is due to the hindrance role of the carbon residue in the agglomerates, and the problem could be solved through adding magnetite concentrate in cold bonded agglomerates.