Study on the Performance of Refractory Materials Affected by Light Rare Earth Oxides

"Rare earth elements have unique properties because of the special electronic structure. In this paper the improvement of refractory material performance by the light rare earth oxides was introduced. The experiments showed that adding a bit of rare earth oxide could obviously improve the performance of the refractory material. INTRODUCTIONIn recent years, refractory materials are widely applied in the steel smelting process as a ladle lining material. In China, although the total production of fire-proof material exceeds normal demand, but the quality and variety of fire-proof material still have a big gap with world advanced level. A number of refractory products need to be imported from abroad. With the rapid development of domestic steel production, the ladle lining with refractory is gradually running after the world advanced level on production technology, production variety, and quality level. It replaces some imported products meeting the needs of the development of the iron making production. Therefore, there is an important significance to research on solving the problems of the ladle refractory reasonably and avoiding or reducing blind and not proper use of the imported refractory ( Jing, 2007).On the other hand, rare earth oxide has some special excellent properties. Firstly, they are very good refractory materials with their high melting point;Next, they have good resistance to water and alkali resistance function;Thirdly, it is easy for rare earth oxide to generated composite oxide reacting with other metal oxide,achieving the purpose to improving the material properties (Xu, 1978; Diao, 1979). China has a variety of rare earth resources,and rare earth resources is more advantageous in Baotou,taking up about 36 percent of world reserves,which is the world's top of rare earth mineral. In recent years the rare earth products output has risen sharply and many varieties and specifications have appeared. So it is necessary to study the new field of rare earth compound to open up new markets. Thus, it has a very vital significance to promote the further development of rare earth industry, adjust the rare earth products structure, ease the contradiction between supply and demand, and improve refractory products quality and grade in order to better serve the main body production.I In this paper, the experiments are mainly for 210 tons of Al2O3-MgO style series refractory materials belong to ladle lining bag from Baotou Iron & Steel Group Corporation Sheet Factory. The improvement to the effect of refractory material performance is explored by using light rare earth oxides as additives."