Blast furnace, lead

Blast furnace hearth design, 72 762-765 Blast furnace ironmaking, 74 498-509 Blast-furnace lead smelting, 14 734-736 Blast furnace material balance, 14 504 Blast furnace plant, 14 506 Blast furnace refractory, carbon as, 72 761-765... 

When stirring with sulfur alone, reversion of copper occurs when silver or tin is the catalyst retarding the reaction between sulfur and lead When the reagent is a mixture of pyrites/sulfur (in the ratio 2 1 - 4 1) rather than S alone, no reversion of copper into lead occurs. Blast furnace lead can be rapidly decoppered to very low values, and the operation is faster at temperatures up to at least 450°C. This procedure does not require the presence of either Ag or Sn. With soft lead, when Ag is present, values as low as 1 ppm Cu were achieved experimentally. Hard lead, with no Ag or Sn, could be decopperised to 0.01%Cu in the presence of 2.3% Sb, or to 0.02%Cu with 5.5% Sb. Thus increasing Sb contents make it impossible to decopper to very low values using a moderate quantity of S alone, and difficult to decopper even with S plus FeSa. Using repeated treatments can, however, continue to remove copper to much lower values. 

Ventilation airflows in particular vary greatly from one plant to another depending on particular configurations and design. If the total gas flows are handled collectively for fume separation the total gas flow will be 9700 Nm per tonne of blast furnace lead and will contain 15 kg of sulfur or 30 kg of SO2. This represents a concentration of 3.1 g of SO2 per Nm or approximately 0.11 per cent by volume. Without dilution by ventilation air the concentration would rise to 6.4 g of SO2 per Nm or 0.22 per cent by volume. 

Any lead(II) sulphate formed in this process is converted to lead(II) silicate by reaction with the quartz. The oxide produced is then mixed with limestone and coke and heated in a blast furnace. The following reactions occur ... 

Copper is frequently a main impurity ia blast-furnace charges, and its limited solubiUty ia molten lead as copper sulfide requires that the excess be removed by chemical reaction with components of the charge. For this reason enough sulfur is left ia the siater to form a copper sulfide matte layer having a specific gravity of 5.2. 

Other Le d Smeltings Processes. Stricter regulations concerning lead emissions and ambient lead in ak levels (see Airpollution), and the necessity to reduce capital and operating costs have encouraged the development of alternative lead smelting processes to replace the sinter plant—blast furnace combination. 

The success of the process results from the fact that nowhere inside the furnace is heat extracted from the copper-saturated blast furnace buUion through a soUd surface. The problem of accretion formation (metal buUd-up), which has plagued many other attempts to estabUsh a copper dtossing operation of this type, does not arise. In the cooling launder, lead-rich matte and slag accumulate on the water-cooled plates, but these ate designed so that when they ate lifted from the buUion stream, the dross cracks off and is swept into the furnace via the cooled lead pot. 

Pyrometa.llurgica.1 Methods. To prepare blast furnace bulhon for commercial sale, certain standards must be met either by the purity of the ores and concentrates smelted or by a series of refining procedures (r6—r8,r20,r21). These separated impurities have market value and the refining operations serve not only to purify the lead, but also to recover valuable by-products. 

In the fumace/ketde batch process, a charge of drossed blast furnace buUion is treated in a reverberatory furnace or a kettie (see Fig. 12). Oxygen is supphed in the form of compressed air or as lead oxide blown into the bath through submerged pipes. The formation of lead oxide serves by mass action to assure the removal of the impurities to the desired low concentrations. The softening reactions are... 

The continuous softening process used by The Broken Hill Associated Smelters Pty., Ltd. is particularly suitable for lead buUion of fairly uniform impurity content. The copper-drossed blast furnace buUion continuously flows in the feed end of a reverberatory furnace at 420°C, and the softened lead leaves the opposite end at 750°C. Oxidation and agitation is provided by compressed air blown through pipes extending down through the arch of the furnace into the bath. 

Decopperized blast furnace bulHon is softened to reduce impurities below 2% before casting as anodes. The electrolyte is a solution of lead fluosUicate [25808-74-6] PhSiF, and free fluosUicic acid [16961 -83-4]. Cathode starting sheets are made from pure electrolytic lead. The concrete electrolytic ceUs are lined with asphalt or a plastic material such as polyethylene. 

Reverberator Furnace. Using a reverberatory furnace, a fine particle feed can be used, the antimony content can be controlled, and batch operations can be carried out when the supply of scrap material is limited. However, the antimony-rich slags formed must be reduced in a blast furnace to recover the contained antimony and lead. For treating battery scrap, the reverberatory furnace serves as a large melting faciUty where the metallic components are hquefted and the oxides and sulfate in the filler material are concurrently reduced to lead metal and the antimony is oxidized. The furnace products are antimony-rich (5 to 9%) slag and low antimony (less than 1%) lead. 

The principal U.S. lead producers, ASARCO Inc. and The Doe Run Co., account for 75% of domestic mine production and 100% of primary lead production. Both companies employ sintering/blast furnace operations at their smelters and pyrometaHurgical methods in their refineries. Domestic mine production in 1992 accounted for over 90% of the U.S. primary lead production the balance originated from the smelting of imported ores and concentrates. 

Many nonferrous metals can be extracted by reduction smelting, eg, copper, tin, nickel, cobalt, silver, antimony, and bismuth. Blast furnaces are sometimes used for the smelting of copper or tin, but flash and reverberatory furnaces are more common for metals other than lead. 

Blast furnaces are charged through the top with coke, flux (usually iron metal and siUca), and scrap while air is iajected through tuyeres continuously at the bottom just above the black copper. The coke (100 kg/1 slag) bums to maintain furnace temperatures of 1200°C, provides the reductant, and maintains an open border. A charge of 10 t/h is typical. The furnace produces a molten black copper that contains about 80% copper. The 2iac, lead, and... 

Recycling of antimony provides a large proportion of the domestic supply of antimony. Secondary antimony is obtained from the treatment of antimony-hearing lead and tin scrap such as battery plates, type metal, beating metal, antimonial lead, etc. The scrap are charged iato blast furnaces, reverberatory furnaces, or rotary furnaces, and an impure lead bulHon or lead alloy is produced. Pure lead or antimony is then added to meet the specifications of the desired lead—antimony alloy. 

Slime masses or any biofilm may substantially reduce heat transfer and increase flow resistance. The thermal conductivity of a biofilm and water are identical (Table 6.1). For a 0.004-in. (lOO-pm)-thick biofilm, the thermal conductivity is only about one-fourth as great as for calcium carbonate and only about half that of analcite. In critical cooling applications such as continuous caster molds and blast furnace tuyeres, decreased thermal conductivity may lead to large transient thermal stresses. Such stresses can produce corrosion-fatigue cracking. Increased scaling and disastrous process failures may also occur if heat transfer is materially reduced. 

The lead blast furnace operates at a lower temperature than the iron blast furnace, die temperature at the tuyeres being around 1600K as opposed to 1900K in the ironmaking furnace (see p. 333) and this produces a gas in which die incoming air is not completely reduced to CO and N2, as much as one per cent oxygen being found in the hearth gas. 

This continuous process is to be compared with a batch process, such as the Belgian retort process. In this, zinc oxide, free of lead or iron is reduced with carbon to produce zinc vapour, which is condensed in the cold section of the retort. The oxygen potential in this system is very much lower dran in the blast furnace, approximately at the C/CO equilibrium value. A vacuum-operated variant of dris level of reduction is caiTied out to produce zinc vapour which is subsequently converted to zinc oxide before condensation of the metal could take place. 

Figure 13.1 Schematic diagram of the blast furnace for the co-production of liquid lead and zince...

Table 13.2 A comparison of the lead and iron blast furnaces...

Stable oxides, such as those of clrromium, vanadium and titanium cannot be reduced to the metal by carbon and tire production of these metals, which have melting points above 2000 K, would lead to a refractoty solid containing carbon. The co-reduction of the oxides widr iron oxide leads to the formation of lower melting products, the feno-alloys, and tlris process is successfully used in industrial production. Since these metals form such stable oxides and carbides, tire process based on carbon reduction in a blast furnace would appear to be unsatisfactory, unless a product samrated with carbon is acceptable. This could not be decarburized by oxygen blowing without significairt re-oxidation of the refractory metal. 

Zinc Zinc is processed very similarly to copper and lead. The zinc is bound in the ore as ZnS, sphalerite. Zinc is also obtained as an impurity from lead smelting, in which it is recovered from the blast furnace slag. 

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