Kinetic Analysis of Green

Pelletization
Introduction

During mining and ore dressing operations, especially where fine

grinding is necessary for wet concentration, a large amount of
0.05 mm fines are generated which is not amenable for sintering
because of very low permeability of bed.

 They are agglomerated by balling them up in the presence of moisture

and suitable additives like bentonite, lime etc. into 8-20 mm or larger
size.
These balls are called green pellets and they are subsequently
hardened for handling and transport by firing or indurating at
temperature of 1200-1350 degrees Celsius.

Advantages of Pelletization Good Reducibilty: Because of their high porosity that is (25-30%)
Good Bed Permeability: Because of their spherical shapes containing
open pores
High uniform Porosity(25-30%): -> Faster reduction.

Less heat consumption than sintering.

Uniform chemical composition & very low LOI:

 Easy handling and transportation.

good resistance to disintegration.

Advantages of using iron ore pellets:

More production
Lesser coal consumption
Increase in campaign life
Better metallization
Reduction in generation of fines
No loss of iron ore
Better environment to work

 General principles of pellet manufacturing

Balling: basic technological procees to transform fines into
agglomerate
Theory of balling of fines:
o Development of thin liquid film on surface of a fine grained raw
material when it is moisturized.
o Formation of bridges at horizontal points of contact.
o Rotation of particles into balls.
o Gradual development of bonding forces in the ball.

 Properties of materials for balling

ballability, i.e. ability to produce balls with satisfactory compression
strength.
size of particles
Distribution of particles
intrinsic specific surface area and shape of particles
wettability of particles and moisture content

Main devices used for manufacturing of pellets

Balling Drum
o screening of the balls and continuous recirculation of under sizes;
o Under sizes are returned 2-3 times to the drum feed size along
with fresh fines.

 Disc Pelletizer
o Combines balling and screening operations;
o motion pattern of material in the disc is comparable to a
conical spiral,
o Discharge: narrower end at the disc lip acts as a path for the
finished pellets to emerge from the disc.
o granulometry depends on the mode in which the raw
materials are fed and on the wetting system in addition to the
main parameters such as disc diameter, inclination and
revolutions.

Kinetic Analysis
overall growth of pellets takes place either by a single elementary
growth mechanism or by coupling of two or more mechanisms.
pattern of growth may switch from one mechanism to another as
pellets grow in size along with compaction, that is, reduction in
the porosity.
it is sufficient as well as convenient to assume that growth is
primarily driven by a single elementary mechanism.
random coalescence dominates in the nuclei growth and the
transition regions
nonrandom coalescence is the principal mechanism in the ball
growth region.
granulation of iron ore fines occurs essentially by coating of fines
present in the feed onto the coarse size fractions which act as
seeds or nuclei, that is, by the auto layering mechanism.
kinetic models provides uniform and consistent basis for
comparing the ballability of a particulate material as a function
of the agglomeration machine and the feed characteristics, such
as fineness, moisture content, etc

Coalescence mechanism
1. Random coalescence model:
. similar to that of the coagulation phenomenon in
colloidal suspensions.
. the rate of coagulation between particles (or coagula)
of two discrete sizes, say i and j, is proportional to the
product of their number concentrations, ni_nj.
. the rate, of coalescence in this so-called restricted-inspace environment should be proportional to number
of pellets of size i and number fraction of pellets of
size j, or vice versa.
. in random coalescence, specific rate constant or
coalescence kernel k is by definition independent of
the size of the interacting pellets.
. . Under these stipulations, the balling kinetics may be
formulated in the framework of particle population
balance

where ni(t) is the number of pellets of size index i at balling time t.