Abstract
Ferronickel production process takes place in two basic stages. The first stage is calcination and preliminary reduction of minerals. These minerals contain significant amounts of iron, which must be partially reduced. The second stage is the final reduction and fusion process of the calcined product. This stage takes place at temperatures of 1600°C, in order to obtain ferronickel. The main objective is to treat nickeliferous laterites with the CaO addition, in order to decrease energy consumptions and the fusion temperature. The mineral composition was 1.78% nickel. The CaO additions were from 3% to 20%. The basicity indexes varied with respect to the CaO amount from 0.55 to 0.81. The fusion temperatures of mineral change between 1496.5 and 1462.9 °C. Metal recoveries (FeNi) change from 15.5 %to 19.3 %. It can be concluded that the addition of CaO is important to lower the melting points in obtaining ferronickel.
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Bello, S.D., Restrepo, O.J., Forero P, Á.H. (2016). Effect of the CaO Addition in the Fusion Process of Nickeliferous Laterites for Ferronickel Production. In: Reddy, R.G., Chaubal, P., Pistorius, P.C., Pal, U. (eds) Advances in Molten Slags, Fluxes, and Salts: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Molten Slags, Fluxes and Salts 2016. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48769-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48769-4_8
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