01:00 pm
Life cycle environmental and cost assessment of ladle refractories management according to circular economy criteria
Dr. Ivan Muñoz | 2.-0 LCA consultants | Spain
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Authors:
Dr. Ivan Muñoz | 2.-0 LCA consultants | Spain
Aintzane Soto | SIDENOR I+D | Spain
Management of ladle refractories by a steel factory in Spain, melting 1 million tonnes of steel scrap per year, is assessed by means of life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC). The case study addresses two situations, namely before and after implementing circular economy strategies developed within the RFCS-funded project E-CO-ladleBrick. Such strategies include reduction of refractory waste generated in the ladles by optimising the ladle life, increasing amounts of worn bricks that can be reused in the production process, or for other purposes, and increasing the amounts of waste refractories that can be recovered as secondary raw materials through recycling. The LCA and LCC studies consider the entire life cycle of refractory products (mining of minerals, processing to obtain refractory raw materials, manufacturing of finished products, use phase and management as waste). For the LCA study, inventory models were built for production of 12 different raw materials and 13 finished shaped and unshaped products. Data were also collected from the steel manufacturer in terms of refractories consumption, waste collection and treatment, as well as costs of these activities. The LCA addressed a set of 14 environmental indicators, while the LCC is expressed in €. The results show both environmental and economic benefits by adopting the developed strategies. Life cycle costs are reduced by approximately 1 million €/year, while GHG emissions are reduced by 2,000 tonnes CO2-eq/year. An analysis of the results shows how each individual measure adopted in the project contributes to achieving these beneficial outcomes.
01:20 pm
Insulating Refractories as an Enabler to Carbon Sustainability, Demonstrated through Life Cycle Assessment.
Dr. Robin Mottram | Morgan Advanced Materials | United Kingdom
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Dr. Robin Mottram | Morgan Advanced Materials | United Kingdom
Anthony Williamson | Morgan Advanced Materials | United States
Tom Steele | Morgan Advanced Materials | United States
Legislation and market forces are necessitating an increasing range of products to declare their carbon footprint; this is reverberating down the supply chain. This paper discusses the cradle to Gate Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for Insulating refractories , including the challenges of obtaining accurate raw material supplier data and attributing scope 1 and scope 2 emissions to individual products. The various methods of presenting the resultant carbon foot print and their interpretation is discussed. Insulating refractory products reduce the amount of carbon emissions from thermal processes, a methodology of differentiating between best in class and consumer grades is presented, this utilises heat flow models, and fuel carbon intensity calculations over the full expected lifetime of a refractory lining.
01:40 pm
Overview on LCA: challenges and opportunities for the refractory industry
João Victor Menezes Cunha | RHI Magnesita GmbH | Austria
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João Victor Menezes Cunha | RHI Magnesita GmbH | Austria
Dr. Thomas Drnek | RHI Magnesita GmbH | Austria
Prof. Dr. Eric Pirard | Université de Liège | Belgium
Organizations have been integrating life cycle thinking, tools, and techniques into decision-making to enable the view of the environmental impacts associated with all stages of a product’s life. In this context, mining has been questioned by the widespread consensus that reducing resource consumption is a requirement to a sustainable development and some authors defend the dream to achieve “zero mining”. From the other side, it is clear that, due to dissipation, virgin raw materials will always be needed, and that circular economy thinking should be within the mining industry and not against it. From this emerges the concern of resource depletion and the abiotic depletion potential (ADP) comes therefore as an attempt to assess the risk of depletion within life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology. However, when coming to mineral resources, a lot of general assumptions are made, and the specificities of each element are often neglected. By attempting to include anthropogenic stocks into the calculations, some authors also neglect the singularities of each product. There is also a big lack of available information about the production of raw materials for the refractory industry. Within the CESAREF consortium, this PhD project is currently starting and have the main goal to build a database, from the mine to the kiln, to support LCA as well as to discuss some topics within the methodology and to account the benefits of refractories recycling.
02:00 pm
Hydrogen: an issue and a new challenge for the durability of refractories
Prof. Dr. Jacques Poirier | University of Orleans | France
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Prof. Dr. Jacques Poirier | University of Orleans | France
To achieve the objectives of the energy transition, green and renewable hydrogen could contribute to decarbonizing many industrial sectors: steel, glass, cement, ceramic industry.
However, the deployment of hydrogen technologies requires removing of barriers les concerning the durability and corrosion of refractory materials.
Industrial issues concerning refractories for decarbonated steelmaking, new energies (production of bio syngas), hydrogen enrichment of the atmosphere of furnaces will be approached with an innovative perspective.
Approaches combining experimental methods and digital tools and making it possible to provide industrial solutions will be detailed in this presentation:
- Post mortem observations
- Thermodynamic calculations
- Experiments (ATG/DSC, corrosion tests) and high temperature characterizations (Raman, HT-DRX, HR-TEM, SEM) on a laboratory scale to identify key parameters and deduce reaction kinetics
- Evolution of microstructures at the micro and nanometric scale
Examples concerning the durability and corrosion of refractories will illustrate this approach.
- Boudouard reaction under CO/H2
- Volatilization and reduction of refractory oxides (SiO2, Fe2O3, alkalines)
- Degradation by H2O
- Other effects (effect on thermal conductivity, Marangoni effect, ….)