Isoconversional analysis of thermal dissociation kinetics of hematite in air and inert atmospheres

Dissociation of hematite is an undesirable reaction for iron ore pelletizing process leading to severe deterioration in compressive cold strength and reducibility factors. It was shown that raising temperature in an induration machine would cause hematite’s dissociation, which is either present in the primary ore or formed by oxidation of magnetite in the feed. The oxidation reaction of magnetite is exothermic, which complicates temperature control within the non-isothermal area of preheating. Kinetics of the dissociation reaction is the temperature’s primary function, which controls the extent of the reaction. Pure hematite samples were subjected to several runs of thermal analysis carried out under both air and inert atmosphere, in order to achieve a comprehensive knowledge about the temperature dependencies of dissociation kinetics. Due to the observed uniformity, isoconversional methods were chosen in the present work over isothermal and non-isothermal for calculation of kinetic parameters of the reaction. Respectively, activation energy values of hematite dissociation were found to be 324 and 382 kJ mol −1 in inert and air atmosphere. The high value of activation energy implies strong dependency of the single-step reaction rate on the temperature. It was also observed that the forward reaction had higher activation energy than the backward reaction; hence, an increase in temperature results in an overall acceleration of the dissociation reaction.