Abstract
The steel industry is known to have one of the highest environmental impacts on the industrial sector, especially in terms of CO2 emissions. The so-called direct reduction route, which makes use of reformed natural gas along with top gas recycling to reduce iron oxide pellets with H2 and CO, is responsible for lower CO2 emissions than the classic blast furnace route and is currently under development. The present article focuses on the direct reduction process and discusses means to further decrease the CO2 emission rate. A set of 10 operating parameters were simultaneously changed according to computer-aided optimization. The results provide about 15% improvement over original emissions for comparable output values.
Highlights
World steel production accounts for 4–6% of global CO2 emissions [1,2]
Natural gas (1) is heated and transformed in the reformer (2) into reducing gas (3), which is sent to a shaft furnace where iron oxide pellets (I) are reduced into Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) (II) while the gas is oxidized and exits as top gas (4)
By trial-and-error, optimal values were found that respected the trade-off between minimal normalized carbon emissions and feasible process designs. This present work is a continuation of this last work and seeks to employ computer-aided optimization and design to further lower the score of the Direct Reduction (DR) process regarding CO2 emissions
Summary
World steel production accounts for 4–6% of global CO2 emissions [1,2]. This can be related to the widely adopted use of the blast furnace for the chemical reduction of iron ore [3]. Process, and its primary technique MIDREX (Midland-Ross Direct Iron Reduction) [6]. This technology has seen increased interest, namely in cases with high natural gas reserves [7,8]. Natural gas (1) is heated and transformed in the reformer (2) into reducing gas (3), which is sent to a shaft furnace where iron oxide pellets (I) are reduced into Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) (II) while the gas is oxidized and exits as top gas (4).
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