Feasible study on the sustainable and clean application of steel slag for abrasive waterjet machining

Abstract

The rapid development of the global steel industry has led to a surge in steel slag. The resource utilization of steel slag has become a hot research topic in the solid waste industry. In this study, a new method of resource utilization of steel slag by replacing garnet with it for abrasive waterjet (AWJ) processing was presented for the first time. Typical brittle material marble and plastic material 6061 aluminum alloy were used as workpieces to evaluate the process performance of the method. The results show that the density, hardness, and surface shape of the steel slag meet the requirement of an ideal abrasive. Steel slag demonstrates comparable performance to the widely utilized garnet abrasive in terms of kerf width and roughness. Particularly, the cutting efficiency of steel slag per unit cost is more than 250% of garnet. Considering the price disparity between the two abrasives, the approach has the potential to reduce operational costs by 45% for AWJ factories, resulting in annual savings of approximately ¥60 million for the AWJ industry in China. Simultaneously, it holds the potential to save 1.549 × 105 GJ of energy and reduce 1.159 × 104 tons of CO2 emissions in the world annually.