The recycling of refractory materials in the chemical, metallurgical and glass industry has only had minor relevance until now because of the high performance required from these materials (stability against corrosion, inert when coming into contact with the glass melt, etc.). Refractory lifetimes are limited because of corrosion at higher temperatures. The best furnace lifetimes has been achieved with chromium oxide and chromium oxide corund refractories. Waste from the production and use of refractory material is generated in three main forms: as residues from cutting and grinding, as refractories which have limited or no contact with glass melts, and as refractories with infiltration of sublimation residues or condensates. The waste material is classified as hazardous waste due to its chromium content. In this study, arc furnace technology was used for thermal treatment of the waste materials to enable recycling of refractory materials. (author abst.)
Slags from the production of high-alloyed steel contain both chemically bound chromium (mainly as Cr2O3) in the mineral fraction and elemental chromium in the metallic remainders. Thermochemical post treatment of the slag in an electric arc furnace under reducing conditions enables the nearly complete recovery of the total amount of chromium in form of a metallic alloy. The best results were achieved by resistance melting (submerged electrodes) with addition of a reducing agent into the melt. The efficiencies of the reducing agents carbon, aluminium, silicon (as ferrosilicon) and silicon carbide were investigated and compared. As aluminium is the strongest reducing agent, it is less selective and reduces much more SiO2 than Cr2O3. While SiC shows only low reactivity because of its high thermal resistance, carbon and silicon had the highest reducing potentials: More than 97% of the chemically bound chromium can be recovered by application of these reducing agents. Due to the high temperature required for the reduction of the chromium compounds, the reduction of SiO2 as an undesired side reaction cannot be avoided. However, compared with mechanical procedures that are limited to the recovery of the metallic remainders, the total chromium recovery can be significantly increased by the described reductive melting procedure.