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voda schreef op 11 januari 2016 20:01:

MIT researcher eliminates CO2 in steelmaking

Sault This Week recently reported that an engineering professor at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology may hold the solution to one obstacle challenging steel future success and viability. Donald Sadoway, the multiple award winning John F. Elliot Professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT, and his team of researchers have developed a method of steelmaking that would eliminate the need for a blast furnace or coke ovens, the major source of greenhouse gas emissions in the present process of ironmaking.

Sadoway told Sault This Week from MIT’s Cambridge, Mass. campus that if large steelmakers like Essar Algoma want a viable way to make steel without greenhouse gas emissions, “I have the answer for them. If they want to continue to make steel, and make it in a way that is carbon neutral then this technology that I’ve developed would replace the blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace. You wouldn’t need a coke oven because you would not be using carbon.”

Regarding Sadoway’s research to find a new process for steelmaking that would reduce or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, he told Sault This Week that the American Iron and Steel Institute had sponsored the research at one point, but they withdrew their support when he and his colleagues suggested they seek government funding to build a commercial-sized pilot project.

Sadoway and his team also received financial support from NASA, because a byproduct of the electrolytic process they have developed is pure oxygen gas, something of great interest to the space agency because of their future plans to create a manned lunar station.

“I conceived of the process to make steel with oxygen as a byproduct but I couldn’t get funding from the American government or steel industry,” Sadoway said. “When I realized that NASA might be interested that we were producing oxygen, I reached out to NASA and they did funding for a period of time.”

Sadoway said that the biggest challenge his team faced in their research was finding a chemical alloy for the electrodes that would not oxidize in the extreme temperatures, around 1,600 degrees Celsius, at which molten iron oxide must be maintained during the steelmaking process, and still allow an electrical current to flow.

They eventually settled on an alloy of iron and chromium, two elements that are abundant and affordable for the electrodes. “This particular alloy is long lived in the cell, so we were able to pass current, make liquid iron at one electrode, and make oxygen gas at the other electrode,” Sadoway said.

He added: “The whole supply chain remains the same, and the whole downstream remains the same. The difference is that instead of using the blast furnace followed by the basic oxygen furnace where huge amounts of carbon dioxide are emitted at about a one-to-one ratio to steel produced, there would be zero carbon emissions providing the electricity isn’t coming from something stupid like burning coal.”

Since joining the MIT faculty in 1978, his classes in chemical metallurgy have risen to become the most popular with students in the university’s history. But it is his research work where he and his colleagues “mentor” students to become future inventors that he has achieved his greatest success and fame. According to media reports, Sadoway and his research team have 19 patents to their credit thus far.

Source : Sault This Week