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Processing Automotive Shredder Fluff for a Blast Furnace Injection

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Abstract

Automotive shredder fluff is a by-product vacuumed during the shredding of end-of-life vehicles (ELV) hulks, and further refined in post-shredder lines of treatment (PST). To date in Europe the mineral part exiting the PST is mostly landfilled without regards for its potentially valuable iron content. Yet, iron could be used as part of the ore in blast furnaces, provided several issues related to the chemical composition of fluff were solved. Besides increasing iron content, several tramp elements must be curbed below tight specifications to avoid iron spoiling, furnace wall corrosion, and changes in the hydrodynamic profiles during iron reduction. The present work aims at designing such a fluff sorting process, on the basis of two representative fluff fractions properly sampled on an industrial PST. The size distributions of these fractions and the repartitions of their chemical elements are used to rationalize and compare three different sorting processes which couple sieving, wet attrition, and dry or wet low intensity magnetic separation. The best process led to an optimized iron recovery of 78.5 % corresponding to an elemental iron content of 51 %, close to the ore grade required in a blast furnace. At the global scale of ELV recycling, these results entail an increase by 4 % of the fluff recycling rate, thus helping to meet the European requirements for 2015.

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Acknowledgments

This work was performed in the frame of contract No. ANR-10-ECOT-013. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the French National Research Agency and other partners of the research project for samples and discussions: ArcelorMittal, LEM (Laboratoire Environnement et Minéralurgie, France) and Recylux. The authors also thank the reviewers for their constructive comments.

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  1. BRGM-D3E, 3 avenue Claude Guillemin, BP 36009, 45060, Orléans Cedex 02, France

    S. Guignot, M. Gamet & N. Menad

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  1. S. Guignot
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  2. M. Gamet
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  3. N. Menad
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Correspondence to S. Guignot.

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Guignot, S., Gamet, M. & Menad, N. Processing Automotive Shredder Fluff for a Blast Furnace Injection. Waste Biomass Valor 4, 843–849 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12649-012-9185-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12649-012-9185-8

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