Garden waste in the blast furnace
Soon, your garden waste to replace coal and coke in the blast furnaces in steel mills. Researchers at Luleå University of Technology research subject Process Metallurgy will in a new research project investigate the possibility of using biomass to reduce carbon emissions in these industries. There is potential for both improving the environment but also cost-effective production of steel.
All that you remove from your garden can be used for the steel industry. But even biomass containing waste products, for example from the pulp industry, can be mixed in the briquettes and pellets that will be used in small-scale experiments that scientists will conduct in this project. The goal is to reduce the use of coke in Swedish blast furnaces.
– The biomass we will use requires some preliminary treatment to get the same energy value, or to develop the same amount of heat such as coke, said Hesham Ahmed, Assistant Professor at the Division of Minerals and Metallurgy.
The materials of biomass becomes easier and burns faster which provides some challenges in how the material to be added into the process. The risk is that it simply flies away because of its light weight. In this project, both the production of briquettes / pellets, analyzes of the firing process, implantation and hazards of the operation to be explored more deeply.
- There are a lot of challenges but we are not starting from scratch, we will take note of previous research in this area and start up the project in the knowledge that exists, said Hesham Ahmed.
The project is financed by the Swedish Energy Agency, Swerea MEFOS, SSAB Merox, LKAB, BioEndev and Sveaskog.
