Carbon Impact Mitigation of the Iron Ore Direct Reduction Process through Computer-Aided Optimization and Design Changes

The steel industry is known to have one of the highest environmental impacts on the industrial sector, especially in terms of CO₂ emissions. The so-called direct reduction route, which makes use of reformed natural gas along with top gas recycling to reduce iron oxide pellets with H₂ and CO, is responsible for lower CO₂ emissions than the classic blast furnace route and is currently under development. The present article focuses on the direct reduction process and discusses means to further decrease the CO₂ emission rate. A set of 10 operating parameters were simultaneously changed according to computer-aided optimization. The results provide about 15% improvement over original emissions for comparable output values.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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