Executive Summary : | The current steel industries are using the most energy intensive route of blast furnace, sintering and converter routes which consumes lot of carbon containing fossil fuels resulting in the emissions of significant amounts of CO2. The steel industry is responsible for about 7% of the world's CO2 emissions due to the high use of fossil fuels. The direct reduction of iron ore with hydrogen is considered to offer a high potential to reduce CO2 emissions, and this direct reduction of iron ore is going to a major focus of research in coming future. The hydrogen if it is produced by carbon free renewable energy sources is called as "Green hydrogen" which will help to produce iron and steels without any CO2 emissions in the future. However the biggest challenge is to achieve massive production of H2 in an economic manner. The suggested process routes in this direction of work involves the direct reduction of iron ore in a shaft furnace operated with hydrogen to produce carbon free DRI followed by its melting in electric arc furnace to produce steel. The both processes offer considerable challenges and they are the major focus of research and development in this field. This research project will focus on the thermodynamic and kinetic behaviors of reduction of iron ore pellets with hydrogen under different conditions. The main objectives are to obtain fundamental knowledge behavior of iron ore under different controlled conditions while reduction with hydrogen goes on. The experimental setups involving vertical furnaces which can control the atmosphere of reducing gases and temperature will be employed for these investigations. The experimental data will be further analyzed to get the insight of the process under different operating conditions in terms of quality of raw materials, size of the pellets, hydrogen flow rates and partial pressures. In this way the process will be studied in overall sense in terms of potential of CO2 reduction and overall kinetics of the process. The results of laboratory based investigations will be further upscaled to large scale industrial applications. |