from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
One of the currently used industrial methods of zinc and lead production is Imperial Smelting Process, based on the use of a shaft furnace. It was created for the processing of traditional minerals of both metals that form compounds with sulfur. Their processing involves the necessity of removing sulfur from the materials before applying them to the furnace. This task is carried out by a specially constructed sinter plant, which also prepares the furnace charge for physical and chemical properties. In recent years, the necessity has become the processing of increasingly-occurring post-production waste containing Zn and Pb on the market, in which the carriers of these metals are ZnO and PbO. These wastes are characterized by very diverse physical properties that negatively affect the sintering process and, as a consequence, the use of such wastes for sinter plant operation, and especially of the shaft furnace. The influence of these properties of materials on the agglomeration process and consequently the production effects of zinc and lead were analyzed. An industrial test was carried out to explain the influence of metal-bearing material size distribution on production effects such as fuel consumption, production, etc.
Keywords: Batch permeability, sinter grain size, zinc and lead production, Imperial Smelting Furnace© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.