PREPARATION OF IRON CARBIDE FROM MAGNETITE PELLETS BY CO-H_2 MIXTURES REDUCTION

1. Introduction Iron carbide has some advantages over products of direct reduction iron and has been put into production in industrial scale1,21, however, the present process only uses natural gas and hematite as material to prepare iron carbide, which has a great limit to the source of kind of reactant gas and iron ore. In recent years, people have done some investigations on preparation of iron carbide using other kind of reactant gas. For example, Hayashi et al~1 made some investigation …

PREPARATION OF IRON CARBIDE FROM MAGNETITE PELLETS BY CO-H2 MIXTURES REDUCTION

A method of preparing iron carbide by reducing magnetite pellets with H_2-CO mixtures is presented. The results show that over 90 percent conversion ratio of iron carbide can be reached at 973K and 1073K under the suitable atmosphere. The reaction process to prepare iron carbide from magnetite can be divided into two stages: reduction of magnetite pellets and carburization of reduction product. The carbon deposition has a great influence on formation of iron carbide. In order to get a high conversion ratio of iron carbide, the relative weight loss value (m) should be controlled between 0.5 to 0.8.