Slat conveyor Ecobelt®

transporthandlingrecycling

Recycling steelmaking slags has become a key issue to close the sustainable production loop. Ladle furnace slag – also called ‘white slag’ due to its high content in calcium oxide – can be successfully recycled as a flux in secondary steelmaking, or routed to other industries (i.e. cement) as raw material. Despite its potentiality, the valorization of LF slag is difficult due to the disintegration phenomenon. During the cooling and conveying operations, this heterogeneous and hard-to-handle material disintegrates into fine dust, placing severe handling and environmental problems. To deal with this issue, the slag is usually sprayed with water to accelerate the cooling process and form a wet material that is not dusty to handle. However, the use of water has an adverse impact on the environmental footprint and causes the lime within the slag to hydrate, which substantially reduces the potential value of this material as a lime substitute in the metallurgical process. To overcome those drawbacks, Magaldi designed the Ecobelt® conveyor, which allows for the dust-free transport of LF slag while providing added cooling without any use of water. The Ecobelt® conveyor features partially overlapping steel pans securely bolted on a patented steel double-wire mesh system. The belt damage-tolerant design is based on a multi-link concept: the mesh provides redundancy, little to no maintenance, and trouble-free continuous operation. Even in case the mesh gets severely damaged, the conveyor will keep running without sudden failures until the scheduled maintenance.