Recovery of Iron from High-Iron Bayer Red Mud by Smelting Reduction

Abstract

The high-iron Bayer red mud, which contains 30–50% iron, is regarded as low-grade iron ore. With the global scarcity of iron supply worldwide, how to effectively utilize the iron in high-iron red mud has attracted more and more attention in recent decades. In this paper, the technology to recovery of iron from high-iron red mud was developed with smelting reduction followed by rapid cooling to separate the metal from slag. The effects of various experiment parameters such as temperature, basicity and reduction time on iron recovery from red mud was studied in detail. The results showed that the separation between metal and slag was complete. The content of iron in metal and iron recovery ratio were 94.06 and 80.16% with basicity of 0.9 smelting at 1600 °C for 30 min. The optimum experiment result were of great significance to achieve large-scale, high-value utilization of red mud.