Traditional treatments of zinc dross have many disadvantages,such as complicated recovering process and serious environmental pollution.In this work,a new process of chlorine removal from zinc dross by microwave was proposed for solving problem of recycling the zinc dross.With better ability of absorbing the microwave than zinc oxide,the main material in zinc dross,chlorides,can be heated and evaporated rapidly during microwave roasting.Various parameters including roasting temperature,duration time and stirring speed were optimized.The microstructure of roasted materials was characterized by X-ray diffraction(XRD) and scanning electron microscope(SEM).The content of the chloride was analyzed by the method of chlorine ion selective electrode.The experiments indicate that the best duration time is 60 min with a stirring speed of 15 r/min during the microwave roasting process.The dechlorination rate reaches peak value of 88% at 700 ℃.The chlorine is removed as HCl gas when water vapor is used as activating agent,which means that it can be recovered into hydrochloride acid.
Most Zn hydrometallurgy factories adopt Cu2SO4 as a dechlorination reagent from zinc solution nowadays, thus much CuCl residue is produced. The existing process of treating this residue is washing with water or sodium carbonate solution, which would cause a lot of troubles to water treatment and waste discharge. A method of microwave roasting was adopted for dechlorination of CuCl residue. A 1.5 kW microwave roasting equipment with dust collection and tail gas adsorption systems was set up and applied during the experiment. By investigating the effect of temperature, heat preservation time, moisture content of raw material and grain size of samples on the dechlorination, the optimal experimental condition is obtained. When the samples with 2% moisture and <150 μm grain size are microwave roasted at 400 °C for 2 h, the Cl content turns from 14.27% to 1.35% and the dechlorination rate is as high as 90%, while that with conventional heating is only 60%-80%. The phase change of the roasting process investigated with X-ray diffraction verifies that CuCl in CuCl residue is removed by being transformed into CuO.
