Abstract
Hydrogen (H2) gas has been proposed as an attractive candidate to replace carbon in metal production. Oxide reduction with H2 releases water (H2O) as the off-gas rather than carbon dioxide (CO2). This has been shown to be feasible, for e.g., iron oxides and some manganese oxides. However, common, more stable oxides, such as manganese monoxide (MnO), are subject to thermodynamic limitations, which prohibit reduction with H2. Utilizing monoatomic or ionized hydrogen (H or H+), abundant in hydrogen plasma, makes the hydrogen-oxide reactions more favorable and allows reactions such as:
The current work demonstrates experimentally the production of metallic manganese by exposing sintered MnO to hydrogen plasma. The hydrogen plasma was generated by passing H2 through a plasma torch. This paper will present the experimental setup and method, as well as characterization of the reaction products. Hypotheses for the reaction paths are presented and discussed in the context of thermodynamics and solidification theory. Furthermore, computational fluid dynamics is used to support the discussions via mathematical modeling of temperature- and flow fields.
Although substantial research is still needed, the presented results demonstrate that hydrogen plasma allows for reduction of more stable oxides than is possible with H2, and that hydrogen plasma-based technologies can be used for manganese production.
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Notes
- 1.
Simulation with the kω SST turbulence model revealed that turbulence effects were mostly negligible (turbulent visosity ratio < 1 everywhere).
- 2.
Torch operation parameters (e.g., flow-rate and power output) were selected to match “typical” operation parameter values from the experimental campaign.
- 3.
Using the kω SST turbulence model with pure argon, the turbulent viscosity ratio was above 10 in large parts of the reactor volume.
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Aarnæs, T.S., Jensen, R., Johnsen, S.G., Dalaker, H. (2023). Manganese Production with Hydrogen Plasma. In: Proceedings of the 62nd Conference of Metallurgists, COM 2023. COM 2023. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38141-6_117
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