The Recycling of Materials Containing Iron and Zinc in the OxyCup Process

Environmentally friendly and economically profitable technologies, enabling utilisation of wastes from metallurgical processes and regeneration of Fe and Zn contained in them, are looked for. This allows also saving of natural resources such as ores. Several techniques have been developed and introduced for recycling sludge and dust that contain iron and zinc. Currently, there are three major ways to treat zinc -bearing dust: rotary hearth furnaces method (the FASTMET process), rotary kiln method (the Waelza process), shaft furnace method (the OXYCUP method). This technology can be used to fully recycle metallurgical wastes such as slag crusts or metal-bearing fractions of desulfurization slags without the need for additional preparation of these materials, dust, sludge and scale generated in different stages of iron and steelmaking. The OXYCUP process described in paper combines the function of melting in traditional cupola furnaces (CF) with function of reduction in blast furnaces (BF).