Brazilian steel waste: electrical arc furnace dust chemical, thermal and morphological characterization

摘要

One of the greatest challenges for the market and organizations is to give the appropriate destination to the produced wastes during the raw transformation process, in which an option is to apply it as a by-product has been studied and tested. The Electrical Arc Furnace - EAF -dust is a generated waste from steelmaking production and it is discharged, but it has potential in civil construction as clinker partial replacement raw and lightweight reinforcement, so as a pH and nutrient corrector for harvestable oxisols. In this paper, EAF dust samples were collected from a semi-integrated steelmaking plant and submitted to the following characterizations: X-Ray Fluorescence, X-Ray Diffractometry, granulometric analysis, differential thermal analysis, and scanning electronic microscopy. The collected data were compared with other scientific papers that studied the same kind of material. The obtained results implied a significant difference in chemical composition from the studied samples, showing substantial zinc, iron, and magnesium concentrations, so as the grain dimensions that influence the EAF dust crystalline structure, being pertinent the search for several applications that contribute to the waste discard reduction and the addition of added value to the production process.