| Abstract Scope |
More than 1.8 billion tons of steel are produced every year, making it the most important alloy in terms of volume and impact. While steel is a sustainability enabler, through lightweight car parts, wind farms and magnets, its primary production is not. Iron is reduced from ore using carbon. This produces >2t COit of steel, standing for >30% of the global CO2 emissions in manufacturing. These emissions can be reduced when replacing carbon by hydrogen or its carriers as reductant.
The lecture presents some recent progress in understanding the key mechanisms of hydrogen-based direct reduction and hydrogen-based plasma reduction. The kinetics of the reactions strongly depend on mass transport kinetics, nucleation during the multiple phase transformations, the oxide's chemistry and microstructure, and on damage and fracture associated with the phase transformation and mass transport phenomena occurring during reduction. Understanding these effects is key to make hydrogen-based reduction of iron ores commercially viable, enabling massive CO2 reductions. |