Elution of zinc in dust discharged from electric arc furnace in carbonic acid solution

The dust discharged from an electric arc furnace (EAF) is a valuable resource of zinc. As a fundamental study of extraction of zinc, iron and chlorine in the EAF dust, the elution behavior of them in carbonic acid solution was studied. The influence of the weight of the EAF dust on the elution behavior was examined in this study. Experiment was carried out putting the EAF dust from 1 g to 200 g in weight into 1 L of water that was introduced by CO2. Generally, the pH in the aqueous solution increased with an increase in weight of the additive EAF dust. Maximums of the eluted concentrations of zinc and chloride ion increased with an increase in the weight of the additive EAF dust whereas the extraction ratios of both of them decreased with an increase in the weight of the additive EAF dust. Iron in the EAF dust remained in the dust without elution. The limit of extraction of zinc from the EAF dust to water was given by the solubilities of ZnFe2O4 and ZnO expressed by eq. (6) and eq. (9) respectively.