Smelting of Domestic Ore in the COREX Process.

The COREX process consists of two main stages - a smelting gasifier and a reduction furnace. The smelting gasifier is a fluidized-bed coal gasification reactor in which a coke bed is built up by blowing in oxygen, and gasification is carried out at the same time in this coke bed. Tests were recently carried out on the large COREX plant at Donawitz. It was found that a much higher gas supply had to be made available for calcination of the ore than would have been required for the reduction process alone, and this would have led to excessively high coal consumption. It is shown how this problem was solved by preheating and calcining the ore charge in one zone and reducing it in another.