Ammonium Chloride Solution Leaching of Crude Zinc Oxide Recovered from Reduction of EAF′s Dust

EAF's dust has been treated mainly by pyrometallurgical reduction process in rotary kiln furnace to recover valuable metal elements such as Zn and to avoid the disposal of hazardous materials to waste. Recently, hydrometallurgical eletrowinning of zinc from a zinc-amino chloride solution obtained by the leaching of EAF's dust was developed to recover high grade zinc metal from EAF’s dust. But there are some disadvantages in each process such as difficulty of operation condition control and sticking problem in kiln process and low extractability and recovery of zinc owing to insoluble zinc-ferrite in electrowinning process. We propose a new combined process of pyrometallurgical one and hydrometallurgical one to treat EAF's dust efficiently and economically. In this study, ammonium chloride solution leaching of crude zinc oxide recovered from reduction of EAF's dust was carried out to find out the efficiency of zinc extraction from it and the possibility for performance of eletrowinning in the proposed process. Effects of various leaching variables ruck as leaching temperature, concentration of leaching solution and leaching time were investigated. And the leaching results of the crude zinc oxide were compared with those of EAF's dust. The extraction percents of zinc in ammonium chloride solution leaching of the crude zinc oxide recovered from reduction of EAF's dust were above 80% after 60 minutes of leaching under the leaching condition of 4M NH$_4$CI concentration and above leaching temperature of 7$0^{\circ}C$. And the concentrations of zinc in the leached solution were obtained above 50g/$\ell$. The activation energy calculated for zinc extraction in NH$_4$CI leaching was 58.1 KJ/㏖ for EAF's dust and 15.8 KJ/㏖ for the crude zinc oxide recovered from reduction of EAF's dust.