Hydrometallurgical

Copper. The recovery of copper [7440-50-8] Cu, from ore leach Hquors as a stage in the hydrometallurgical route to the pure metal is one of the... 

Hydrometallurgical Flow Sheets. The various hydrometallurgy operations can be combined in many ways to design processes appropriate for specific metals. 

Ura.nium, The hydrometallurgical treatment of uranium ores is a concentration and purification process. Typical ore grade is 0.1—0.5% U Og, and pregnant solutions contain ca 1 kg/m of U Og. The dissolution requires the presence of an oxidant, either oxygen or a ferric salt. 

Concentrated waste solutions are obtained from spent metal plating baths and etchants. However, the majority of metal wastes are soflds or sludges obtained from the hydrolysis of metal-bearing solutions and industrial process effluents. Most of these water-insoluble wastes are composed of hydroxides or basic salts of the contained metals. Eor processing by hydrometallurgical routes the materials must be brought into solution usually by acid or ammoniacal or alkaline digestion. 

D. H. Jennings, R. T. McAndrew, and E. S. Stratigakos, A Hydrometallurgical Methodfor Recovering Selenium and Tellurium from Copper Refinery Slimes, paper no. A 68-69, TMS, Warrendale, Pa., 1968. 

Hydrometallurgical Processes. Recovery of sulfur in the processing of nonferrous metal sulfides has been in the form of SO2 and/or H2SO4 when smelter (pyrometallurgical) operations are employed. However, there have been accounts of processes, mainly hydrometallurgical, in which sulfur is recovered in the elemental form (see Metallurgy, extractive). 

In the most common hydrometallurgical process for zinc manufacturing, the ore is leached with sulfuric acid to extract the lead/zinc. These processes can operate at atmospheric pressure or as pressure leach circuits. Lead/zinc is recovered from solution by electrowinning, a process similar to electrolytic refining. The process most commonly used for low-grade deposits is heap leaching. Imperial smelting is also used for zinc ores. 

Alcohols with a C8 - Cn chain length, characterized by low solubility in aqueous media, may have a particular commercial potential as perspective extractants for tantalum and niobium hydrometallurgical processing. Particular emphasis has been placed recently on the investigation of tantalum and niobium extraction using octanol (C8Hi80) in the forms of 1-octanol and 2-octanol [462,466-473]. 

The copper product is known as blister copper because of the appearance of air bubbles in the solidified metal. In the hydrometallurgical process, soluble Cu2+ ions are formed by the action of sulfuric acid on the ores. Then the metal is obtained by reducing these ions in aqueous solution either electrolytically or chemically, by using an inexpensive reducing agent that has a more negative standard potential than that of copper, such as hydrogen or iron (see Section 14.3) ... 

The reduction is thermodynamically favored, because the standard potential of the couple Cu2+/Cu is positive (E° = +0.34 V). Metals with negative standard potentials, such as zinc (E° = —0.76 V) and nickel (E° = —0.23 V), cannot be extracted hydrometallurgically. 

By way of an example, one may consider the case of hydrometallurgical reactors. Leaching is the most important of the different unit operations, and is prominently placed and assigned due emphasis in a typical hydrometallurgical process flowsheet. A representative list of the various types of reactors used for agitation leaching is given in Table 1.21. 

Apart from pyrometallurgy, the various ingredients of heterogeneous reaction kinetics are also very pertinent to several hydrometallurgical operations. This will be discussed in Chapter 5. 

The pyrochemical process of zirconium-hafnium separation is particularly attractive not only because it makes the entire process of nuclear-grade zirconium metal production from zircon more economical than that involving a hydrometallurgical separation stage, but also... 

At present, leaching is one of the most essential front-end operations in hydrometallurgy, but in future hydrometallurgical processes for secondary metal recovery, treatment of low grade and complex ores, and research and development into high-temperature and high-pressure processes will become increasingly important. 

Nickel sulfide concentrates are first subjected to an oxidizing treatment and then converted to nickel matte which is processed by hydrometallurgical methods. These methods have been indicated as A, C, and D in Figure 5.6. 

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