Recent Development in Slag Treatment and Dust Recycling

Slags from metallurgical processes are widely used in different fields of application, e.g. in the building industry and as fertilisers. Nevertheless, also these by-products have to be improved to ensure their sustainable use. The treatment of liquid slags, e.g. by changing their composition outside of the steel production process, will lead to interesting new properties of the newly formed products and thus guarantee their use in the future. Moreover, dust and sludges from off-gas cleaning of metallurgical processes are becoming promising resource for coating and alloying elements. The very important element Zn for surface coating is enriched in the dusts, due to the recycling of Zn coated scrap. On the other hand, Zn might run short in the future, so that recovering of Zn from dusts and sludges may become necessary. To improve the efficiency of Zn recovery a dust re-cycling process has been developed for EAF steelmaking by FEhS-Institute. Some interesting side effects are supported by the dust recycling. It has been proved that the slag foaming can be enhanced by dust recycling, even for stainless steelmaking processes. Finally it can be shown that recovery of valuable elements from residues of iron and steelmaking is becoming more and more important. New developed processes are ready to be implemented into the daily steelmaking practise.