The Quantitative Effect of Blast Furnace Slag Composition and Temperature on the Kinetics of Potassium Evaporation

Increased in-plant recycling and lower quality raw material in terms of alkali content drive the alkali load in the blast furnace (BF) to higher levels. Excessive load of alkalis, primarily potassium, has several negative effects on the BF operation, which necessitates means to control the removal of potassium from the BF. One method to improve the removal is by increasing the potassium retention in the slag, which is controlled by the evaporation kinetics of potassium. Although several authors have studied factors affecting the evaporation rate, none of these studies have quantitatively investigated the effect of these parameters and attempted to relate these effects to slags from the industry. In the present work, a full-factorial design of experiments with three factors (B2 basicity, MgO content, and temperature) was performed, studying the evaporation of potassium from synthetic BF slag. The results suggested that multiple linear regression is suitable to describe the evaporation kinetics of potassium within the boundaries of the design of experiments. However, extrapolating to industrial slags of different compositions and additional slag components is best performed utilizing the corrected optical basicity. The corrected optical basicity showed a linear relation to the evaporation kinetics of potassium, which was related to the correlation between diffusivity and corrected optical basicity.