Drying of Iron Ore Pellets

Iron ore pellets is a highly refined product and for companies such as LKAB it is important to constantly improve the pelletization in order to enhance production and improve product quality.

A long term goal has been established to develop and considerably refine tools and techniques with which the drying zone can be optimized. The aim with this project is to numerically and experimentally investigate how material and processing parameters influence the drying. This will be applied to several scales: i). The constituents of the pellets and their properties and geometry. ii) The geometry of the pellet, their permeability and size distribution. iii) The geometry of the bed and the processing conditions including the state of the air (ex. humidity, temperature and velocity). Numerical models of convective and diffusion driven moisture transport are thus derived on several scales.

Experimental studies are carried out in order to validate the models and to determine unknown material parameters. The latter will probably be done in cooperation with other HLRC-projects.

Anna-Lena Ljung and T. Staffan Lundström