BCONTVentures wrote: And another informative article on DROSRITE: Aluminum Dross - Stop burning your bottom line! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/aluminum-dross-stop-burning-your-bottom-line-david-d-aoust/?trackingId=BMrfWPd9QNqbu8oIrvT3gg%3D%3D From the smallest 'mom & pop' aluminum die casting facility producing a handful of parts per year, to the largest international primary smelters producing a million tonnes of aluminum billets per year; if you are melting aluminum during your production process, you share an expensive problem. You are losing anywhere from 2-10% of your total smelting capacity in the form of oxides/dross, and it is impacting your bottom line.
Lets use a fictional SME (small/medium sized enterprise) aluminum die casting plant producing 15,000 tonnes per year of cast parts as an example. This casting operation has an extremely advanced facility complete with top of the line foundry equipment and near perfect skimming practices. They are very proud to have reduced their dross production to a mere 2%. This means they are losing around 300 tonnes of aluminum per year in the form of dross, or approximately $658,500 at today's aluminum prices (US$ 2195/Tonne).
At this point, the obvious business decision is to simply ship the dross to a secondary smelter/toller who will process it for a fee of around $350/MT and recover/return around 40% of the dross in the form of usable aluminum billets. Going this route, our example casting plant can return around 120 tonnes of aluminum back into their operations at a cost of $105,000. In other words, they have managed to reduce that original $658,500 loss into an annual loss of $553,500 and they hardly had to break a sweat.
But there must be a way for our example SME die caster to further reduce the impact of dross on their bottom line. Could they vertically integrate the dross recycling process instead of paying a toller to do the job?
No. There are a few reasons why this hasn't been economical in the past. Conventional technology employed by tollers for aluminum recovery from dross is called Rotary Salt Furnace. In the RSF process, dross is charged with a salt flux in the furnace. Salt is added to protect the metal from oxidation and facilitate the separation of the metal from the oxide. As much as 50% salt is added to the dross in RSF, and the resulting byproduct produced is called salt-cake. For every 1 tonne of dross processed in RSF, 1 tonne of toxic salt-cake waste is produced. It is a mixture of oxide, residual metal, salts and nitrides. This byproduct is considered hazardous in many jurisdictions and presents environmental challenges in its management: toxic leachates can be released, and the cake can be reactive in a landfill environment. The salt vapors emitted by the process also cause their own challenges as they tend to be corrosive. Primarily due to the hazardous nature of the salt cake & difficulties with disposal, combined with the natural process inefficiencies at recovering aluminum, it has not been economical for aluminum smelters to install dross recycling systems in house. It simply does not make sense for our example parts caster to take on a 300 TPY toxic waste stream and assume the environmental liabilities.
However, due to a breakthrough innovation by an advanced Canadian plasma green-tech engineering and high temperature metallurgical company PyroGenesis Canada Inc, there is a new environmentally friendly dross separation technology called DROSRITE™, that solves all of these legacy industry issues and makes a very clear cut business case for any company melting aluminum to vertically integrate the dross recycling process. DROSRITE™ is the worlds first truly salt-free dross rotary tilt furnace. DROSRITE™ offers reduced operating costs compared to RSF (no salt & no external oil/gas burner required) and increased revenues due to substantially improved aluminum recovery rates. (20-40% higher aluminum recovery than leading RSF systems). Because the DROSRITE™ process is salt free, it creates no hazardous salt-cake waste residues. It is compact, cheap to maintain & highly automated. The net result is the world's first dross separation process that can be integrated into any aluminum casting plant or primary smelting facility generating substantial bottom line savings. DROSRITE™ comes in various sizing options, DROSRITE™ SL (300-500tpy of dross capacity) & DROSRITE™ HEAVY (3000 or 5000tpy of dross capacity).
Considering the total DROSRITE™ OPEX (backed by data collected on commercial installations which can be obtained at plasma@pyrogenesis.com). Our example casting company producing 300 TPY of dross can easily save $396,906 per year through a DROSRITE™ SL installation, effectively reducing their original aluminum loss of $658,500 into an annual loss of only $238,506. Not accounted for in these savings are potential carbon credits that may apply as more jurisdictions implement carbon tax policies, as DROSRITE™ uses the left over, unrecoverable aluminum to reheat the furnace (controlled thermiting reaction), utilizing what would otherwise be landfill/waste byproduct to heat the furnace and power the process. This allows DROSRITE™ to be used without an oil or gas burner, eliminating the production of GHG emissions and further adding to the DROSRITE™ advantages. Because the remaining residues produced are salt free, they are 100% recyclable and can be sold straight back to PyroGenesis.
Technical Summary:
The DROSRITE™ process is illustrated schematically below. In DROSRITE™, hot and/or cold dross is charged into the refractory-lined furnace (step 1) which is (1) sealed and maintained under an inert argon atmosphere and (2) contains a specific amount of preheated filling material leftover from the previous processing batch. After the rotary tilting separation period (step 2) is completed, the metal is recovered (step 3) and returned in the hot/molten phase to the originating furnace or left to cool down as ingots, while a partial amount of the remaining material is discharged (step 4), i.e. the residue, leaving some material inside the furnace, i.e. the filling material. Since this filling material still contains some unrecoverable metal, a controlled amount of oxygen is injected (step 5) to react with it (controlled thermiting reaction) and therefore generate the heat required for melting the next processing batch. Thus, under normal operating conditions, DROSRITE™ does not require any external heat source or salt fluxes, making the process energy requirements very low and the carbon footprint significantly reduced compared to competing technologies. Furthermore, the residue being salt free, it can be fed back to the electrolytic cells of an aluminum smelter or reused as a construction material, as a flux in the steel making industry or for any other application where salt free alumina is required, such as the cement industry
In conclusion, DROSRITE™ is the worlds first highly efficient method of extracting aluminum from dross, without the use of fluxing salts. (no toxic, salt-cake wastes are produced). DROSRITE™ is designed to be used on-site, it is compact, highly automated, and is designed to be charged with hot or cold dross, being fed directly after skimming. The net result is a green technology that enables aluminum casters and primary smelters to vertically integrate the dross separation process, substantially reducing the negative impact of dross on the bottom line.
EtheGreat wrote: Once Again Great DROSRITE DD by BContV !!!
Additionally ::
"...pleased to provide an update further to its press release dated September 27th, which announced that the Company had signed a joint venture and license agreement (both agreements collectively the “JV”) with a leading residue processor (the “JV Partner”) to ultimately build and operate plants around the globe to transform dross residues (a by-product of the Company’s DROSRITE™ process) into high value chemical and metallurgical products. ".. It is the transformation of these residues into high-value products to sell on the open market – a process known as “valorization” - for which the 50:50 JV agreement was signed,
with an end goal of building and operating dross residue valorization facilities worldwide to serve areas of high dross production, and locations where PyroGenesis’ DROSRITE™ systems are operating