Separation of the magnetic fraction from the slags originated during steel production

Metallurgical slags originating during pig iron and steel manufacturing, are valuable sources of the inorganic materials. The limitation of their recycling is usually connected to the expensive methods of the separation of the components. The steel furnace slags (FS) as well as ladle slags (LS) contains reasonable amount of iron bonded in different forms, predominantly in iron oxides. In this paper we are reporting the results of the dry and wet separation techniques used for the isolation of the magnetic fraction presented in FS and LS. The results obtained indicate the dry magnetic separation as not suitable for this purpose, while wet method was found to be promising. In this research the FS containing approx. 30 wt% of Fe 2 O 3 and LS containing approx. 17 wt% of Fe 2 O 3 were milled to the fraction less than 0.1 mm and then subjected to the process of dry and wet separation of the magnetic fraction. It was observed that the dry separation is not suitable, since 100 % of the materials were recovered showing the intensive homogenization of the magnetic fraction during the milling process. On the other hand, the wet separation led to the isolation of 26 and 30 wt% of magnetic fractions for FS and LS, respectively. The isolated magnetic fractions contained 41 and 40 wt% of Fe 2 O 3 in the case of the FS and LS, respectively. The fractions obtained during the separation were subjected to the chemical and phase analysis, the morphology of the particles was studied using scanning electron microscopy.