Recent advances in iron ore sintering

Sintering is the most economic and widely used agglomeration process to prepare iron ore fines for blast furnace use. Owing to the depleting reserves of traditional high grade iron ore, there have been considerable changes in iron ore resources available throughout the world, especially in steel mills in East Asia. Corresponding to the changes in the availability of iron ore resources, the amount of impurities in iron ore has been slowly increasing. Some of these impurities have been found to have deleterious impacts on sinter quality and sintering performance. In the meantime, an increasing number of large blast furnaces with inner volumes of more than 5000 m3 have been built in East Asia which require more sinter and are often more demanding in terms of the quality requirements of the ferrous materials. Finally, sinter plants are facing increasing pressure due to more stringent regulations regarding their environmental impact. This paper gives an overall review of a variety of technologies developed worldwide to tackle the changing raw material characteristics and mitigate emissions from sintering operations. Given the high sinter usage and volume of their blast furnaces, most of the recent sintering technologies have originated from East Asia, particularly Japan.