Carbon dioxide/water beneficiation concentration

The environmental problem of sulfur dioxide emission, as has been pointed out, is very much associated with sulfidic sources of metals, among which a peer example is copper production. In this context, it would be beneficial to describe the past and present approaches to copper smelting. In the past, copper metallurgy was dominated by reverberatory furnaces for smelting sulfidic copper concentrate to matte, followed by the use of Pierce-Smith converters to convert the matte into blister copper. The sulfur dioxide stream from the reverberatory furnaces is continuous but not rich in sulfur dioxide (about 1%) because it contains carbon dioxide and water vapor (products of fuel combustion), nitrogen from the air (used in the combustion of that fuel), and excess air. The gas is quite dilute and unworthy of economical conversion of its sulfur content into sulfuric acid. In the past, the course chosen was to construct stacks to disperse the gas into the atmosphere in order to minimize its adverse effects on the immediate surroundings. However, this is not an en-... 

After mining, barite is finely crushed and ground and undergoes a flotation beneficiation process to concentrate and separate barite from byproduct minerals (e.g., quartz). Then the concentrate ore is reduced by pyrolysis in a kiln to barium sulfide (i.e., BaS or black ash). The black ash is then dissolved in pure water, and the aqueous solution is treated with sodium carbonate to precipitate the barium-carbonate crystals. After the witherite crystals are removed and dried, the carbonate undergoes calcination, evolving carbon dioxide and giving anhydrous barium oxide, BaO. Barium metal could be obtained either by thermal reduction of the previously obtained barium oxide with molten aluminum in a vacuum or by fused barium chloride electrolysis. 

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