Determination of Zinc in Gas Cleaning Dust Emissions from Electrometallurgical Production

The study focuses on the specific features of zinc determination in dust emissions from gas cleaning systems used in an electrometallurgical plant used to process scrap metal. X-ray powder diffraction, energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (EDXRF), and inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP–AES) were employed to identify the elemental and phase compositions of the dust emissions, including zinc oxide, zinc ferrite, halite, sylvite, and magnetite. Based on these compositions, an analytical procedure was developed. The proposed rapid energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry method for zinc determination in dust emissions involves constructing a calibration curve with matrix effect corrections. The relative deviation for zinc determination using EDXRF with matrix correction was 2.1%, while for ICP–AES it was 2.5%. The zinc determination method was tested on real samples of gas cleaning dust emissions.