Abstract
Steel is one of the most widely used materials in the past and today. Various techniques are used to recycle this material, including the electric arc furnace. This process has several advantages, but it also has a major disadvantage, namely, the generation of waste such as electric arc furnace dusts. Electric arc furnace dusts are classified as hazardous waste due to their high percentage of heavy metals, including zinc. Consequently, in the present research, the leaching of zinc for recovery with sulfuric acid solutions at ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure is evaluated, as well as the reuse of the leaching process residue as a raw material for ceramic materials. The sulfuric acid solutions were 0.125, 0.25, 0.5, and 1 molar, using clay for ceramic conforming and percentages of the leaching residue from 0–50%. The results showed that the optimum solution was 1 molar sulfuric acid, recovering all the zinc in the sample in 36 h. Furthermore, it was found that the clay-conformed ceramics with less than 40% leaching residue showed acceptable physical and mechanical properties according to standards. Therefore, this research develops a new environmental hydrometallurgy in which metallic elements of interest are valorized and the production of waste is avoided, reducing the deposition of hazardous waste in landfills and the extraction of raw materials for the manufacture of construction materials.
Highlights
Steel is a material that was widely used in the past and in the present, as its economy and resistance make it difficult to replace, even today [1]
This section describes the main materials used in this research, as well as the tests carried out to obtain a clear and scientific methodology to assess the possible leaching of zinc from electric arc furnace dusts and its subsequent use in ceramics
The results of the tests mentioned in the methodology of this research allow us to obtain a series of partial conclusions that derive in the confirmation of the final objective
Summary
Steel is a material that was widely used in the past and in the present, as its economy and resistance make it difficult to replace, even today [1]. The electric arc furnace established itself as a process for obtaining steel from scrap due to its simplicity, novelty and optimization [6]. It has a series of disadvantages that must be considered, one of the main ones being the generation of waste [7] Among these wastes, and due to the fact that the electric arc furnace process is carried out at high temperatures, are electric arc furnace dusts [8]. The particles retained in the gases reach 99.9% [10], deriving from the most volatile elements found in the scrap, such as zinc These electric arc furnace dusts are considered by the European Waste Catalogue as a hazardous waste [11], producing about 15–20 kg per ton of final steel [12].
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