8th International Congress on Science and Technology of Ironmaking - ICSTI 2018

The only HIsmelt process in the world was moved from Kwinana, Australia to Shandong, China in 2013 and all the related copyright has also been transferred from Rio Tinto to a Chinese company in 2017. The Shandong HIsmelt plant was put into operation in June, 2016 and it has achieved 70-day continuous operation with the highest daily production being 1876 t/d. This is the first time to achieve continuous industrial and commercial operation of HIsmelt process without the utilization of coke and iron ore aggregates. During the construction and operation process in the past 5 years, a lot of technical improvements such as process innovation with rotary kiln furnace, optimization of smelting reduction vessel (SRV) system, adoption of new refractory materials, operation improvement with intermittent tapping, etc., have been made. Meanwhile, the operation indexes were improved compressively compared with the indexes of Kwinana HIsmelt plant. An overview of those operation indexes were also introduced in this paper. The successful operation of Chinese HIsmelt plant with low cost will promote the advancement of the ironmaking by replace part of blast furnace iron production capacity with sustainable and green HIsmelt process.