Pretreatment of Manganese Ore for Improved Energy Efficiency and Smelting Furnace Stability

Preheating of feed for smelting in submerged arc furnace (SAF), has shown to have numerous advantages in the ferroalloy industry. In ferrochrome smelting industry for example, preheating the feed before smelting in SAF has shown excellent results in stabilizing SAF smelting operation by removing moisture and volatiles. More importantly, preheating has shown to reduce smelting energy consumption and to increase the smelting furnace capacity. Furthermore, reducing SAF energy consumption has significant benefits in reducing CO2 emissions. However, preheating technology is currently not widely used in ferromanganese production. In ferromanganese production, smelting is mostly done using a mixture of lump and sintered ore as feed to SAF. The behaviour of feed during preheating in separate shaft kiln is still poorly known in smelting. This research is aimed at understanding optimal operating conditions/steps that could be suitable for using preheating technology when lump ore is used in the feed mix. This is also one of the goals of the EU- funded PreMa project.