Reduction and Carbonization of Iron Concentrate with Hydrogen-Rich Gas

Iron concentrate can be obtained from vanadium titanium bearing magnetite ore through beneficiation, which mainly recovers iron and vanadium resources through the process of blast-furnace ironmaking and converter vanadium extraction. However, this process has the bottleneck problems of large carbon emission and high process energy consumption, which does not meet the development trend of green and low-carbon smelting. Based on hydrogen metallurgy technology, the reduction and carbonization of iron concentrate in hydrogen-rich gas system (CH₄–H₂ gas mixture) was studied in this paper. The theoretical calculation results show that the Fe-containing phase in iron concentrate could be completely reduced and carbonized to Fe₃C above 709 °C, while Fe₃C cannot exist stably below 900 ℃. The experimental results are basically consistent with the thermodynamic results. The results preliminarily confirm the feasibility of producing high value-added product Fe₃C from iron concentrate by hydrogen-rich gas, which provides a possible way of smelting iron concentrate.