Injection of Plastics in Electric Arc Furnace

EasyChair Preprint 9456

Abstract

With the increasing use of plastics, its sustainable re-use and recycling has become a serious environmental challenge. At JSW steel a new technology to inject plastics in electric arc furnace (EAF) as a foaming agent has been developed and implemented. EAF utilizes coal /coke fines to increase the foaming behavior of its slag for stable arcing and reduced arcing time. In the present work the in-house generated plastics were shredded to < 5 mm size and pneumatically injected into the EAF slag as a replacement of coke fines. For handling these fine shredded plastics, a unique pneumatic conveying system for has been developed which is first of its kind where different types of plastic particles are fully suspended in the conveying air and transported at controlled low pressure and high velocity into the furnace without choking from a single unit. The controlled burning inside the furnace takes advantage of the generated gases. This method of recycling plastics has huge potential to get consumed in large steel making furnaces. India’s first EAF plastic injection system has been commissioned at SMS-3 in JSW Steel Vijayanagar works and is injecting 70 -100 kgs in each heat. The use of plastics has reduced the equivalent coke fines consumption and shown improvements in slag foaming and furnace efficiency along with over all CO2 emission reduction.

Keyphrases: EAF, Plastic, Recycling, injection

@booklet{EasyChair:9456,
  author    = {Mukund Manish and Satish D Kumar and N Amareshappa and Prabhat Kumar Ghorui},
  title     = {Injection of Plastics in Electric Arc Furnace},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 9456},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}