Recovering and recycling scrap from dumps containing steelmaking slags

Abstract

The company Mittal Stil Temirtau has accumulated more than 13 million tons of steelmaking slag, and it annually adds another 600,000 tons of slag to this amount from ongoing production operations. Here, some of the iron from the production process is lost in the form of metallic iron and oxides. The total amount of iron lost is estimated to be 15%. Studies have established that discarded steelmaking slags contain up to 8% magnetic products. A slag-processing unit began operation at the dump in 2003 to recover scrap from the slag. The unit has a productivity of 120 tons of bank slag per hour and can process slag with an initial coarseness of up to 700 mm. Extracting iron-bearing products from steelmaking slags and returning them to the production cycle has reduced iron losses by 30% for the metallurgical conversion as a whole.