ASH UTILIZATION WITH SKICA AND METALS RECOVERY Sol Shcherban The International Association of Sciences, Inc., 1IO Bennett Ave., # 3H New York, NY 10033
Keywords: coal fly ash, utilization, silica and metals recovely ABSTRACT The annual generation of electric power in the United States results in production of over 43 million tons of fly ash. Only about 22% of this amount is presently utilized. Neither of the used ash applications requires the recovery of metals and other valuable components (i). In the process of studying, there is another group of methods based on direct recovely of metals from ash (ii). This paper continues presentation of new technologies for ash processing with silica pre-extraction process (SP-process) and recovery of metals. Silica in ash represent about 40-65% of the total, therefore the possibility of silica recovering and converting into a wide variety of pure chemical silicate products with the predetermined properties is one of the main advantages o f new technologies. For technical and economic features these perspective technologies present the third new group of methods of ash utilization (iii). INTRODUCTION In 1993, approximately 43.4 million metric tons of coal combustion fly ash were produced by the electric utilities in the United States [I]. Only about 22% of this amount was used mainly for cement, concrete products, and other [2]. For these applications, ash is used in an unsophisticated way without recovery of same components (i). The low level of ash utilization shows that such applications are insufficient for the complete utilization of fly ash, which is why there is a constant need for finding new ways to increase utilization of fly ash. For a significant increase in ash utilization, it is necessary to expand the assortment of useful products which can be produced from ash.
Aluminum is one of the major ash components. Many chemo-metallurgical methods were proposed for recovery of alumina from high-silica alumina-containing ores and industrial by-products including ashes (ii). As applied to ashes, these methods have two fundamentally important deficiencies which make them non- or low- profitable. One of them consists of great outlet streams of raw materials and intermediate products which leads to high capital and operating costs of alumina production [3-51. As it will be shown below, no less important is the second deficiency withdrawal of silica from the technological process in the form of solid residue. Conversion of silica into solid residue restricts the possibility of its utilization while silica represents the largest component of ash (40-65% of the total). This paper continues to present new technologies for ash processing which makes it possible to reduce the outlet streams of raw materials and intermediate products, and to put out the most part of silica in the form of chemical silicate products (iii). The earlier papers described the background and main operations of new technologies [6,7]. The purpose of this paper is to expose main features of new technologies with silica pre-extraction process and to evaluate their possible influence on the economic showings. EXPERIMENTAL Object of research. It is important to distinguish the varieties of ashes for choosing methods of the metal recovery, depending on chemical and mineralogical compositions of ash. As object of present consideration, ashes with low content of calcium and magnesium compounds were chosen. Ashes of some typical United States’ coals of West Virginia, Ohio, and Illinois as well as ashes of Ekibastuz (Kazakhstan, Russia), Donetzk, Kuznetzk, Podmoscow (Ukraine and Russia) coals are suitable for this consideration. The chemical analysis of ashes and traditional raw materials used by aluminum industry are given in Table 1,
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