Mineral Processing
Dorna Pirouzan; Reza Parvareh; Ziaeddin Pourkarimi; Mehdi Rahimi; Javad Moosavi; Hossein Habibi
Abstract
In our country, a massive volume of slag is generated annually from steel production facilities, amounting to about 20 percent of the total steel produced. This slag is an important and valuable source for extracting vanadium, with 67 percent of the world's vanadium production sourced from slag. Iran ...
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In our country, a massive volume of slag is generated annually from steel production facilities, amounting to about 20 percent of the total steel produced. This slag is an important and valuable source for extracting vanadium, with 67 percent of the world's vanadium production sourced from slag. Iran ranks among the top five countries that possess this vital metal; however, vanadium extraction from slag has not been carried out to date. Moreover, due to the unstable quality of the slag, its utilization in other industries has not been feasible. To prevent the environmentally harmful effects of accumulating slag and the inability to utilize it in various industries, it is essential to implement an economic solution for recovering the components present in steel-making slag. In the present project, after sampling from the stored slag deposits at Mobarakeh Steel Company, comprehensive laboratory and pilot-scale studies were conducted on the representative samples. Through processes involving roasting with sodium carbonate, acid leaching with 2 M sulfuric acid, iron cementation, solvent extraction using DEHPA, stripping, and scrubbing, we successfully extracted pentoxide vanadium with high purity suitable for producing ferrovanadium.
