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

The majority of existing blast furnaces plants use a dustcatcher as the primary process for removal of the process dust from the top gas. In recent years, there has been a trend to replace the dustcatcher with a cyclone: increasing the efficiency of dust removal, increasing the dry dust recycle to (for example) the sinter plant, and reducing the sludge volume generated from wet gas cleaning. This change provides a reduction in operation expenditure, but with the cost of installing a new cyclone with the necessary plant modifications – changes which can take considerable time and cost within the arrangement of an operating blast furnace. In order to reduce these problems of capital cost and shutdown time, Primetals have developed a solution to convert a dustcatcher into a cyclone, retaining the OPEX advantage at significantly reduced CAPEX. The paper will describe the technology that Primetals have developed.