Recycling of Iron Sintered Wastes Into Nanoparticles Barium Hexaferrite and Zinc-Ferrite Glass-Ceramics

About 25 % of iron oxides in the sintering process are wastes. In this paper, sintered waste (SW) was used as a source of iron oxides to prepare both hard and soft magnetic glass-ceramics via a melting-quenching technique. About 71 % by wt. of sintered waste was used for preparing soft magnetic glass-ceramics, while ～46 % was used for preparing hard magnetic glass-ceramics. The comparison between ferrimagnetic glass-ceramics prepared from pure chemicals and that from sintered waste before and after heat treatment was studied. X-ray diffraction shows crystallization of both hematite and Zn-ferrite phases in sintered waste while pure Zn-ferrite or Ba-hexaferrite phases were crystallized in soft magnetic and hard magnetic glass-ceramics, prepared from sintered waste, respectively. Transmission electron microscopy determined the crystalliza- tion of nano-particles ～20 nm and <15 nm for soft and hard magnetic glass-ceramics respectively. Vibrating scanning magnetometry revealed a significant increase in saturation magnetization from ～26 emu/g for sintered waste to ～44 emu/g in soft magnetic glass ceramics while it decreased to ～12 emu/g for hard magnetic glass-ceramics.