Study of Fluxes to Promote the Dissolution Behavior of Al in Fly Ash

Abstract

Aluminum recycling is an important step to achieve high value-added utilization of fly ash to improve the leaching efficiency of Al. In this paper, Na₂CO₃ was used as the flux and HCl as the leaching solution to extract Al from CFA by using the roasting activation-acid leaching process to investigate the influencing factors of the leaching rate of Al to analyze the mineral composition of the roasting products explore the activation process of CFA roasting. The experimental results showed that compared with NaF, CaO, and NaOH, the highest Al leaching rate was achieved when Na₂CO₃ was used as a flux, at which time the leaching rate could reach up to 81.62%, and it was about 63% higher than that of extracting Al from the fly ash using direct roasting-acid leaching method. When the roasting time is 90 min, the roasting temperature is 850°C, the CFA/Na₂CO₃ is 1.5, the hydrochloric acid concentration is 4 mol/L, the acid leaching temperature is 90°C, the S/L is 1:4, and the maximum leaching rate of Al is 81.62%. According to the thermodynamic theory, Na₂CO₃ and mullite gradually reacted with each other above 800 K to form chalcopyrite, and Na₂CO₃ reacted with mullite and quartz in CFA to form chalcopyrite more easily. According to the reaction kinetic model, the acid leaching process of CFA is mainly controlled by diffusion, and a semi-empirical equation is proposed to describe the whole leaching process.