Adaptation of the Pedersen Process to the Ferruginous Bauxites of the Pacific Northwest

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The Pedersen process was developed by Harold Pedersen, in Norway, around 1926; it is currently in use in many parts of the world including U.S.S.R., China, Manchuria, Korea, Japan, and Sweden. The Pedersen process operates on the principle of smelting alumina and iron-bearing material in an electric arc furnace with lime and coke to produce a calcium aluminate slag in which the aluminate is leachable by sodium carbonate solution; such smelting also results in recovery of an iron byproduct. Pedersen adapted his process to various aluminous materials that formed slags containing 3.5 to 30 percent silica and 2 to 3 percent titania. He obtained high-alumina extraction from both high- and low-silica slags except those that were in the 6- to 10-percent silica range (1-2, 6-7). Smelting of Pacific Northwest ferruginous bauxites produces slags that contain about twice as much titania as those of Pedersen, many of which are in the difficult 6- to 10-percent silica range. The lack of phase-diagram information in the literature for the SiO2-CaO-Al2O3-TiO2 system in the 2 to 8 percent TiO2 area made it impossible to predict the effect of the higher TiO2 content on the formation of leachable calcium aluminate slags obtained by smelting these bauxites.

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