Metallurgical, mineral and mining operations can no longer afford to landfill by-products or waste streams. Rising disposal costs and tighter environmental regulations combine with increasing customer demand for sustainable supplier practices. The result? A growing interest in extracting value from production residues for recovery and reuse.
The challenge is to find the right process — one that’s scalable, sustainable and offers a return on investment sooner rather than later. Today, more companies are using stiff extrusion, a technology proven in heavy clay, for resource recovery and reuse. The Steele 3EX, our laboratory extruder, offers the ideal introduction to the technology.
The R&D tool for shaping tough raw materials
• Bauxite
• Biosolids
• Blast furnace sludge
• Board scrap
• Cement
• Clays and shales
• Coal fines
• Dust and sludge from flue gas purification
• Filter cakes
• Fly ash
• Gypsum
• Iron ore and oxides
• Laterite
• Lignite
• Lithium clay
• Manganese ore
• Metallic fines
• Mill scale
• Mine paste
• Mullite
• Nickel laterite
• Paper sludge
• Salts
• Sand
• Sawdust
• Scrap fiber
• Slag
• Sludges
• Tailings
• Wallboard
• Wash plant products
Don’t see your raw material here?
Contact us at info@jcsteele.com to see if we can help.
Prototyping with lower cost and risk
We’ve used the 3EX in our test lab for over 20 years to qualify raw materials. Despite its benchtop footprint, the 3EX extrudes products with the same performance as our larger production models. It’s ideal for R&D, providing fast evaluations of material mixes and extruded products with lower cost and risk.
The 3EX lets you agglomerate and pelletize high-value by-products. You can hand-feed small test batches, using a range of dies to extrude different structural shapes or pellets. Rapid prototyping becomes faster and more effective, as you can change variables and see immediate results.
Small changes demonstrate how your ideas will work at scale. Change your material mix, experimenting with more or less binder and water. Try different shapes. Run no vacuum, full vacuum or partial. Your new prototypes exit the die ready for analysis.
R&D for faster commercialization
Stiff extrusion is well-known in the heavy clay industry. Brick, block and tile makers prize the strength of extruded shapes fresh out of the die. They can direct set green products on kiln cars for firing, without the added time and cost of removing moisture.
The word about stiff extrusion is spreading to other industries. Integrated steel mills now use stiff extrusion to produce high-quality furnace feedstock and solve their landfill problems. Recovering high-value metallics from blast furnace slag, mill scale, dust and sludge supports zero-waste steelmaking and the circular economy.
Our process, which uses high-shear mixing and vacuum de-airing, shapes these materials into durable units. These cold-bonded pellets or briquettes are durable enough for rough handling in their green state. They also stand up to multiple moves and belt transfers without excess dust generation.
The 3EX lets metallurgical customers refine feedstock for their specific melt recipe. It offers a scalable, low-risk way to experiment, without waiting years for a commercial payoff.
The 3EX converts skeptics as well as raw materials
There are all kinds of exotic, capital-intensive technologies on the market to extract value from by-products and waste streams. Is stiff extrusion right for your operations? The 3EX removes the risk from answering that question, demonstrating proof of concept at a greatly reduced cost.
If you have a tough raw material that needs shaping to extract its full value, then you should look at the 3EX. You can buy or lease this lab extruder for your R&D center or extrusion plant, to qualify your material faster and with lower risk.
