Influence of sintering temperature on the characteristics of shale brick containing oil well-derived drilling waste.

INTRODUCTION: The influence of sintering temperature on the physico-mechanical characteristics (such as water absorption, apparent porosity, bulk density, weight loss on ignition, firing shrinkage, and compressive strength), leachability, and microstructure of shale brick containing oil well-derived drilling waste (DW) was investigated. METHODS: The experiments were conducted at a temperature ranging from 950°C to 1,050°C with 30% DW addition. RESULTS: The results indicate that increasing the sintering temperature decreases the water absorption and apparent porosity and increases the shrinkage, density, and compressive strength of sintered specimens. Moreover, the physico-mechanical properties of samples sintered at 1,050°C meet the requirements of the MU20 according to GB/T 5101-2003 (in China). The heavy metal concentrations of the leachate are much lower than the current regulatory limits according to GB16889-2008. CONCLUSION: The results from XRD and SEM show that increasing sintering temperature results in an increase of the high temperature liquid phase, which may have a significant effect on the densification process of the samples.

[Environment load from China's cement production].

Based on the life-cycle theory, a quantitative evaluation of the environment load caused by cement manufacturing in China was carried out with the application of the CML. environmental impact assessment method. The results show that global warming potential, energy depletion potential and abiotic depletion potential make the main contribution to the environment impact, their environmental loads corresponding to identical environmental impact sorts being 2.76%, 2.34% and 1.39% of the overall load of the whole world, respectively. In 2004, the environment load from cement manufacturing in China is roughly 1.28% of the overall load of the whole world, in which the environmental loads from the shaft kiln processing, wet rotary processing and new-type dry processing being 0.84%, 0.12% and 0.32%, respectively. And it can be reduced to about 1% by replacing backward production processes with the dry method production process.