Study of Industrial Leaching Process of the Steelmaking Zinc Dust with High Content of Silicon

In this work, the traditional two-stage hydrometallurgy leaching process and the neutralization-flocculation leaching process were used for treating the dust, produced in steelmaking process. The results of the comparison of two processes show that traditional techniques could produce the accumulation of silicone gel generated by cycles which hampers the followed filtration process seriously. These situations make it unable to meet the production requirements. By contrast, the filtration process was fast after the acidic leaching when considering the neutralization-flocculation process. Furthermore, leaching solution processing performed better while adding iron and charcoal for improving the effect of the treatment processes. The results showed that zinc leaching rate was above 93%, and desilication rate was above 99%. Meanwhile, filtration rate of the iron-silicon residue was as fast as 4.7 m3 .m-2 .h-1.