Investigation of production of iron nugget from mill scales

Scale (iron oxide) which is mainly magnetite, is produced during the rolling of steel sheets in the steel making process. Mill scale is considered as a valuable secondary raw material in iron and steel production due to its high iron content and low impurities.The recycling of mill scale is only carried out in the blast furnace iron ? steel integrated plants by participating sinter blend in our country. 74.1% of the production was carried out by the electric arc furnace plants in our country. Unfortunately, high amounts of exposed scale is not sufficiently enough assessed. These scales either used in non-value-added sectors or exported at a low price. The recycling of valuable these raw materials will provide an alternative option against imported scrapping while using electric arc furnace plants. The different temperature and durations of reduction experiments were performed in this study in order to produce iron nugget from mill scale. Briquettes those are prepared from lignite, anthracite coal and coke is used in order to examine the availability of different coal types of recycling scales in the experiments. The additives are introduced into pre-prepared blends in order to facilitate the separation of metal ?slag. In the result of the series experiments, examined the effects of temperature, duration, types of coal, the quantity of carbon, the additive and the resulting slag of the formation of the iron nugget from mill scale is investigated. The mechanism of the iron nugget is examined and it is tried to be revealed.XIVObtained results demonstrate that each factor have significant impact on the formation of iron nugget. And also they demonstrate that the type of coal used has great importance because of each coal have different combustion characteristics and to product desired quality for the iron nugget, the other parameters must depend on type of coal.Temperature has quite significance for facilitate combustion of coal, acceleration of the reduction reactions, separation of the metal and slag after passing molten phase.In the result of the series experiments, the most positive results are provided from briquetted produced by coke, slow combustion of anthracite coal, high speed combustion of lignite coal were found to be negative.Keywords: mill scale, recycling, high temperature reduction, iron nugget, coke, anthracite, lignite