Paul Wurth

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Residue treatment

CIROVAL® – A CIRCULAR ECONOMY APPROACH

Ecological awareness and responsibility, increasingly stringent environmental regulations and the more and more critical supply of raw materials make the application of new metal recovery processes a priority. Today the steel industry produces by-products, which are not fully valued. One of them is the sludge produced by the wet gas cleaning system of the blast furnace, with a high lead and zinc content.

Taking up this environmental challenge, Paul Wurth developed the CIROVAL® technology, a hydrometallurgical process designed to selectively remove the zinc and lead in order to recycle the entire quantity of blast furnace sludge back to the blast furnace route.

An innovative
two-step process

Leaching: During this first step, zinc and lead are selectively leached from the BF sludge using hydrochloric acid under oxidising conditions. The leaching step results in a recyclable sludge, a pure iron carbon by-product that can be reintroduced at the sinter plant, replace a part of the anthracite amount, or returned in the form of briquettes directly back to the blast furnace.

Neutralisation: The subsequent neutralisation allows to produce a thoroughly washed Zn/Pb-concentrate that can be recycled in the non-ferrous industry. The remaining salty water that can be recycled internally or in the salt industry.

After successful laboratory tests and the feasibility of the technology being demonstrated at a mobile pilot plant, ArcelorMittal, in a co-development with Paul Wurth, decided to build in Dunkirk the first industrial CIROVAL plant designed for treating 15’000t/year of BF sludge.

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