Mine solution, copper recovery using

A relatively small number of commercial operations, such as those of the SEC Corporation at El Paso, Texas,162 and of the Nippon Mining Company at Hitachi, Japan,163 use ort/io-hydroxy-oximes for the recovery of nickel. In the SEC Corporation process, the aqueous feed solution consists of a crystallizer discharge stream from a local copper refinery, and contains about 70 g of copper... 

Even not recognized as such, the galvanic displacement deposition of noble metals such as Au or Ag onto Fe, Zn, Cu, or similar substrates is known since the times of early Mediterranean cultures and, possibly, before. In the sixteenth century, the recovery of copper from copper mine waters by contacting dilute process streams with iron scrap was successfully achieved [2]. Since that time, many different galvanic displacement deposition processes have been developed. Examples used on industrial scale include application of aluminum, iron, or zinc powders for the removal of copper, silver, gold, or other noble metals from waste solutions. Similar approaches are used for the solution purification in hydrometallurgical plants, electronics, electrochemical experiments, etc. 

The first commercial reagents were aU based on ketoxime functionality and were used exclusively for copper extraction for over a decade after the first full-scale application at Bluebird Ranchers Mine, Arizona, in 1968 (Arbiter and Fletcher 1994). Today, ketoximes are still successfully used in niche applications for the recovery of copper from dilute leach liquors and also find applications in nickel SX from ammoniacal solutions and in precious metal refining (see Sections S.3.3.3 and 5.3.6.2). Particular applications of ketoximes in copper production are at El Tesoro and Lomas Bayas in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where the leach liquors of circuits often contain high... 

In this section, we present the results of our studies on the recovery of copper from an actual solvent extraction raffinate from a copper mine in the United States and compare its performance to Dowex 43084 on mock ore solutions. Fourteen bed volumes of a solution containing 3000-ppm ferric ion and 1000-ppm cupric ion at pH 1.5 were passed through a 5-mL column containing CuWRAM at 2 bed volumes per minute. The experiment was repeated using the same volume of Dowex 43084 (labeled XFS, its alternative name, in Fig. 12). The contents of the sulfuric acid strip solutions reveal that the CuWRAM is more selective and has a higher flow capacity at relatively rapid flow rates. The difference in flow capacity is partially due to the difference in particle size of the two materials (100 pm for CuWRAM and 250-500 pm for XFS). However, we have previously shown that at equal particle sizes and flow rates the silica-polyamine composites have about 80% better flow capacities at 2-bed volumes per minute and at equal particle sizes (see section I.B). 2 ... 

---