Reductive Smelting for the Recovery of Nickel in a DC Arc Furnace

It is possible to recover nickel pyrometallurgically from a variety of secondary materials, such as slag, where the nickel is present either as entrained metallic particles or as dissolved oxides. If oxides are present, reductive smelting is used to get the nickel into the metallic form. One useful way of recovering the nickel is to collect it in an iron alloy. A DC arc furnace can be used very effectively for this purpose. Mintek has demonstrated this process on a number of furnaces, the largest of which is a 3 MW DC arc furnace. A water atomization demonstration plant has recently been commissioned, with the purpose of producing alloy particles of a size that is appropriate for further downstream processing.