Behavior of Liquid Phase Formation during Iron Ores Sintering

The improvement of industrial parameters like the basicity and sintering temperature and the selection of raw materials to form the acicular calcium ferrites become the hot topic in sintering production. However, the experimental with the sintering pot in the laboratory is still a main method up to now, no effective mathematical model or experience equations were developed. Factsage is a software for thermodynamic calculation in ironmaking and steelmaking. In present study, Factsage was used to calculate the liquid phases formulation during the sintering. The effect of the chemical compositions on the liquidus projection was also discussed. It was found that the content of liquid phase formed is about 25%-70% at 1250 degrees C due to their chemical composition. The more SiO2, the easier to form liquid phase. The experiments were carried out for the validation. It was found that the calculations of the mass of liquid phase generation cannot give a very good and accurate agreement with the measurement of the melting behavior of the sample quantificationally, however, for the ability of the liquid phase formation during the sintering, the calculations can give a good qualitative results, especially in the temperature of melting begin and the temperature of 50% shrinkage. The calculations reported in this study can be used to estimate the sintering behavior of the iron ores under a certain industrial condition to reduce the extra experiments. The experiments also shows that the calculations by Factsage can give some good explanations on the phenomenon of the melting behavior of different samples.