Kinetic Mechanism Development for the Direct Reduction of Single Hematite Pellets in H2/CO Atmospheres

Abstract

Increasing interest in the direct reduction process of iron ore has revived investigations on gaseous and heterogeneous iron oxides’ kinetics. Despite extensive studies on the reduction of iron oxides with pure hydrogen or syngas, the development of a generic reduction mechanism for iron oxides is still lacking. The conventional shrinking core model hardly distinguishes between transport and reaction processes, leading to biases or even errors in the kinetic models. In the present study, a porous solid model, which solves mass balances of the individual gas‐phase species and solid ones assuming spherical symmetry, is used for developing a heterogeneous kinetic mechanism accounting for different iron oxidation stages (Fe2O3, Fe3O4, FeO). It also accounts for carbon accumulation and cementite formation to model the carburization phenomena when using carbon‐containing reducing agents like syngas. The proposed generic mechanism successfully reproduces 49 experimental data sets from the literature for single iron oxide pellets’ isothermal reduction with syngas of varying hydrogen content up to pure hydrogen without any adjustment of its parameters. The model predictions are in excellent agreement with the experimental data. Finally, the carburization kinetics are explained, and the factors (e.g., temperature, hydrogen content) affecting the carbon deposition are analyzed.