Swelling behavior of hot preheated pellets in reduction roasting process

One kind of facile coal-based direct reduction process is using hot preheated pellets for reduction in grate kiln. In this work, effects of reduction parameters on swelling index of hot preheated pellets were investigated by photographic technique under isothermal conditions. Experimental results show that swelling index of pellets is firstly increased then gradually decreased with increasing reduction time, while that is found to be an obvious decrease from 175 % to 30% with the variation of temperature from 900℃ to 1100℃. Results of XRD combined with SEM reveal that swelling behavior of pellets is decided by structure of newly formed metal iron grains. The formation and growth of fibers iron grains promote the increase in volume. Low temperature and low CO content are favored to the formation and orientated growth of metal iron grains in the one step process.