Study of smelting Egyptian black sand ilmenite by using El Magara coal

Abstract

Black sand is beach deposits that come from the headwaters of the Nile, which are rich in heavy minerals. The major economic mineral is ilmenite. It represents around 60 – 70 % of economic minerals quantity. To increase the adding value of the national resources carried out a serial of experiments to study smelting process for producing high Titania slag and cast iron. The main factors which affected on the process are the amounts of carbon, time of experiments and amount of flux agent. The effect of many factors such as time which were (20, 25 & 30 min), carbon content which were (15 %, 20 % & 30 %) and using a flux agent which were (1 %, 2 % & 3 %) were studied, as well as the properties of some mechanical samples such as hardness and drop number. As a result of these studies, we obtained some important results on the importance of the effect of time on iron yield, and that the content of the preferred flux agent gives good results on iron yield. The obtained iron yield is 80.5 % and the assay of titanium dioxide in Titania slag is 77.6 %.

Keywords

• ilmenite smelting
• titania slag
• cast iron
• carbothermic reaction
• black sand