Document Type : Research Paper
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Abstract
This paper reports on Material flow analysis and energy consumption in the world iron ore and steel industries. These analyses imply that the production of world iron ore has increased from 274 million tons in 1950 to 3000 million tons in the year 2012. The production of world steel also has been raised from 207 to 1540 million tons at the same time. Since the rate of production in mining and steel industries is on the rise, reducing of energy consumption can lead to a large proportion of energy. It should be noted that many studies have been worked on saving energy and the reduction of polluted gases; however, the previous studies were restricted to the cliché information and had some drawbacks in the procedural level. In this study, first, world’s resources of iron ore, iron and steel production were studied. Second, the consumption energy in the mining and steel industries were separately analyzed. Finally, some suggestions for the reduction of energy consumption in different stages were made. The highest proportion of consumption energy in mining procedure is related to grinding process (40%) and material transformation (about 17%). Since china is the largest country producing steel and is one of the biggest energy consumers and pollution makers in the world, it was studied in the current paper. The findings of the study revealed that due to the use of recent technologies in 2007, the overall energy consumption, the fresh water consumption and the total emission of SO2, declined per ton of steel by about 8%, 24% and 4.5% respectively, when compared with that in 2005. Also, the results have shown that the energy consumption of blast furnace is 2.5 times the energy used by electric arc one.
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