Adsorption of Zn, Cd, V, Ba, Cu, Mo, Ni, Cr, Li and Pb to silicon and aluminium reduced AOD-slag

During production of steel, slag is formed as a by-product. The process of steelmaking involves usage of additives such as chromium or vanadium as reactants to optimize and produce high quality steel. Vast amounts of slag are formed and there is a continuous search for applications that can make good use of the slag. Currently the use of slag in cleaning of metal polluted waters is researched and promising results has been found for many different types of slags. In this work two different AOD-slags has been used as sorbents for some selected elements (Zn, V, Cr, Mo, Pb, Li, Cd, Ba, Cu, Ni). The main difference between the two slags is the reducing agent that has been used, aluminium and silicon. This results in slags with different adsorption properties. The aluminium reduced slag show tendency for better adsorption capacities in general for the tested elements (Zn, V, Cr, Mo, Pb, Li, Cd, Ba, Cu, Ni), with a few exceptions. The buffering capacity of the materials were high, shown by the fact that final pH reached nearly 11.5 independent of the start pH (varied between 2 and 8). The adsorption process was rather quick and 24 minutes contact time was in most cases sufficient to reach equilibrium. For several of the elements e.g. Lithium, the maximum capacity of the slags was not reached even though a load of 3,07 mg Lithium was added per gram of slag