Shaft furnace
Recycling miracle: A new shaft furnace converts waste materials into high-quality hot metal.
ThyssenKrupp Steel AG's new OxiCup Shaft Furnace helps conserve resources and avoid waste. A 35-strong pioneering team has been working since 1999 on developing one of the world's most advanced recycling plants. The furnace allows iron-bearing dust, scrap and slag to be converted into high-quality hot metal which is fed back directly to the production chain. This raises the recycling rate to 99 percent and reduces the amount of ore the Company has to purchase from overseas. The raw materials for the furnace are large, black, hexagonal bricks made from the so-called flue and steelmaking dusts filtered out of the air during iron and steel production. As the furnace cannot process dust on its own, the team developed a method of turning the dust into agglomerated bricks. Numerous trials were required to find out exactly how big and stable the bricks need to be and how much oxygen has to be fed to the furnace. But the effort was worthwhile, and the roughly 25 million euro investment was money well spent. The gas from the OxiCup is fed to the site's own power station, while the slag is used in road construction. And with around five percent of daily hot metal production now coming from the shaft furnace, less use needs to be made of the "classic" blast furnace route. This reduces CO2 emissions by up to 200,000 tons per year.
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