A Novel Proposal for Manufacturing Steel: OSRAM's CO$_2$ Steel Making Process

TL;DR

This paper introduces the OSRAM-CO$_2$-SM process, a novel method for steel manufacturing that uses recycled CO$_2$ for decarburisation, potentially reducing atmospheric CO$_2$ emissions.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new CO$_2$-based steel-making process that recycles CO$_2$ and demonstrates effective decarburisation at high temperatures through lab experiments.

Findings

Lab experiments show reduction of carbon content from 7% to 1% using CO$_2$ at 1100°C.

Decarburisation is more effective when CO$_2$ is used at temperatures favoring the Boudouard reaction.

The process enables reuse of CO$_2$, reducing overall emissions.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a concept to utilise Carbon-dioxide for Steel-Making and would like to name it after the first author as OSRAM-CO$_2$-SM process. We found in our lab experiments that the carbon content in high-carbon ferro-chrome metallic powders has come down from 7% to 1% when pure CO$_2$ gas with partial pressure of 1 atmosphere is passed through a horizontal retort furnace maintained at 1100$^o$ C for 24 hours. Our results clearly demonstrated that decarburisation can be very effective, when CO$_2$ is used at temperatures where it is unstable and the Boudouard reaction which is endothermic in nature is more favoured. Based on these findings, we propose the OSRAM-CO$_2$-SM process in which CO$_2$ shall be used as the decarburising agent. CO$_2$ is to be passed into a specially designed converter provided with heating mechanism to maintain the contents from blast furnace in a molten state for decarburisation of the melt. The out coming hot gases consisting of CO has to be burnt in a combustion chamber with stochiometric proportions of pure O$_2$ to produce CO$_2$ at a partial pressure close to 1 atm.The process will be extremely useful as it involves reuse and recycle of CO$_2$ and in turn would reduce the overall amount of CO$_2$ discharged into the atmosphere.