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    Xtractive Etallurgy: Mineral Processing

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    Salim Chohan
    Hydrometallurgy is an extractive metallurgy process that uses aqueous chemistry to separate metals from ores or other metal-containing materials. There are several key steps: 1) Leaching - dissolving the desired metal out of the solid material into an aqueous solution through chemical or microbial action. 2) Treating the leach solution - concentrating and purifying the metal ions through techniques like solvent extraction or ion exchange. 3) Recovering the purified metal - through precipitation, electrolysis or other processes to produce a saleable product or intermediate for further refining.

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    Xtractive Etallurgy: Mineral Processing

    Uploaded by

    Salim Chohan
    62 views15 pages
    Hydrometallurgy is an extractive metallurgy process that uses aqueous chemistry to separate metals from ores or other metal-containing materials. There are several key steps: 1) Leaching - dissolving the desired metal out of the solid material into an aqueous solution through chemical or microbial action. 2) Treating the leach solution - concentrating and purifying the metal ions through techniques like solvent extraction or ion exchange. 3) Recovering the purified metal - through precipitation, electrolysis or other processes to produce a saleable product or intermediate for further refining.

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    Leeching

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    Hydrometallurgy is an extractive metallurgy process that uses aqueous chemistry to separate metals from ores or other metal-containing materials. There are several key steps: 1) Leaching - dissolving the desired metal out of the solid material into an aqueous solution through chemical or microbial action. 2) Treating the leach solution - concentrating and purifying the metal ions through techniques like solvent extraction or ion exchange. 3) Recovering the purified metal - through precipitation, electrolysis or other processes to produce a saleable product or intermediate for further refining.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    62 views15 pages

    Xtractive Etallurgy: Mineral Processing

    Uploaded by

    Salim Chohan
    Hydrometallurgy is an extractive metallurgy process that uses aqueous chemistry to separate metals from ores or other metal-containing materials. There are several key steps: 1) Leaching - dissolving the desired metal out of the solid material into an aqueous solution through chemical or microbial action. 2) Treating the leach solution - concentrating and purifying the metal ions through techniques like solvent extraction or ion exchange. 3) Recovering the purified metal - through precipitation, electrolysis or other processes to produce a saleable product or intermediate for further refining.

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    The key takeaways are that hydrometallurgy involves extracting metals into aqueous solutions and recovering them through various chemical and physical processes based on inorganic chemistry and physical chemistry principles.

    The main processes involved in hydrometallurgy are leaching, treatment of leach solutions (including concentration, purification, precipitation), and metal recovery (including electrolysis, gaseous reduction, precipitation).

    Leaching in hydrometallurgy involves the removal of soluble metal values from ores or concentrates into aqueous solutions through chemical or microbial action. It is the first main step in extracting metals.

    SALEEM CHOHAN CH-018

    EXTRACTIVE METALLURGY
    Extractive metallurgy is the study of the processes used in the separation and concentration (benefication) of raw materials. The field is an applied science, covering all aspects of the physical and chemical processes used to produce mineral-containing and metallic materials, sometimes for direct use as a finished product, but more often in a form that requires further physical processing which is generally the subject of physical metallurgy, ceramics, and other disciplines within the broad field of materials science. The field of extractive metallurgy encompasses many specialty subdisciplines, each concerned with various physical and chemical processes that are steps in an overall process of producing a particular material. These specialties are generically grouped into the categories of : Mineral processing: the process of separating commercially valuable minerals from their ores can involve four general types of unit operation: comminution particle size reduction; sizing separation of particle sizes by screening or classification; concentration by taking advantage of physical and surface chemical properties; and dewatering solid/liquid separation

    Hydrometallurgy: involving the use of aqueous chemistry for the recovery of metals

    Pyrometallurgy: metallurgical ores

    thermal treatment of minerals and

    Electrometallurgy: concerned with the processes of metal


    electrode position

    HYDROMETALLURGY
    INTRODUCTION: Hydrometallurgy is a extractive metallurgy in which metals are extracted into an aqueous solution and subsequently recovered by a variety of methods based on the science of inorganic and physical chemistry It deals with :the leaching of metal values by chemical reagents or bacterial action at ambient or elevated pressures and temperatures; separation of solids from leach liquors; removal of impurities and recovery of metal values by precipitation,ion exchange, solvent extraction,gaseous reduction, cementation, electro-winning and electrorefining; pre-treatment of ores by roasting or chemical treatments such as halogenation or reduction; recycling of reagents and treatment of effluents Hydrometallurgical technologies, which differ from pyrometallurgical processes in that the desired metals are separated from undesirables using techniques that capitalize on differences between constituent solubilities and/or electrochemical properties in acid or basic solutions at temperatures generally below 300C.

    PROCESES INVOLVED IN HYDROMETALLURGY


    There are generally following procceses are involved in hydrometallurgy:

    1) LEACHING
    Leaching, sometimes called solidliquid (or liquidsolid) extraction, involves the removal of a soluble fraction (the solute or leachant ) of a solid material by a liquid solvent. The solute diffuses from inside the solid into the surrounding solvent..Either the extracted solid fraction or the insoluble solids, or both, may be valuable products. Leaching is widely used in the metallurgical, natural product, and food industries. METHODS AND EQUIPMENTS: In metallurgy, leaching may involve oxidation or reduction reactions of the solid with the solvent. In many hydrometallurgical processes, one or more steps are required to separate liquids from solids. A variety of options are available, including screening, settling, filtration, and centrifuging, depending on the size and physical characteristics of the solids in the slurry. Equipment ( e.g Batch Extractors, Espresso Machine or Continuous Extractors etc ) is available to conduct leaching under batch, semi-continuous, or continuous operating conditions. Leachable solids generally undergo pretreatment before being fed to leaching equipment so that reasonable leaching times are obtained. Metallurgical ores are crushed and ground to small particles because small regions of leachable material may be surrounded by relatively impermeable insoluble material.Effluents from a leaching stage are essentially solids-free liquid, called the overflow, and wet solids, the underflow. To reduce the concentration of solute in the liquid portion of the underflow, leaching is often accompanied by countercurrent-flow

    washing stages. The combined process produces a final overflow, referred to as extract, which contains some of the solvent and most of the solute; and a final underflow, the extracted or leached solids,which are wet with almost pure solvent. Ideally, the soluble solids are perfectly separated from the insoluble solids, but solvent is distributed to both products.

    Therefore, additional processing of the extract and the leached solids is necessary to recover solvent for recycle.Typical leaching agents are dilute acids, bases, salts, and sometimes water . Leaching processes are also used to chemically remove contaminants from soils or other solids. Examples include removing mercury, organics, and other contaminants.

    Important chemical factors, those that influence the liquid-solid partitioning (LSP) of a constituent, include solution pH, redox, the presence of dissolved organic matter, and biological activity. Physical factors, such as relative hydraulic conductivity, porosity and fill geometry, play an important role in determining the rate at which constituents transport through a solid into a passing liquid phase.

    2) TREATMENT OF LEACH SOLUTION


    i) SOLUTION CONCENTRATION AND PURIFICATION

    After leaching, the leach liquor must normally undergo concentration of the metal ions that are to be recovered. Additionally, undesirable metal ions sometimes require removal. Solvent Extraction Ion Exchange :

    SOLVENT EXTRACTION
    Solvent extraction (SX), sometimes called liquid ion exchange, is used to selectively concentrate and purify a desired element after it has been dissolved in an aqueous solution, frequently an acid leach liquor. The liquor is contacted with an organic solvent, chosen for its selectivity towards the element or elements of interest

    ION EXCHANGE PROCESS


    In an ion-exchange process, ions of positive charge (cations) or negative charge (anions) in a liquid solution, usually aqueous, replace dissimilar and displaceable ions, called counter-ions, of the same charge contained in a solid ion exchanger, which also contains immobile, insoluble,and permanently bound co-ions of the opposite charge. Thus ,ion exchange can be cation or anion exchange.

    Water softening by ion exchange involves a cation exchanger, in which areaction replaces calcium ions with sodium ions:

    where R is the ion exchanger. The exchange of ions is reversible and does not cause any permanent change to the solid ion-exchanger structure. Thus, it can be used and re used unless fouled by organic compounds in the liquid feed that attach to exchange sites on and within the ion exchange resin. Some examples include cyanide removal from wastewater, gold recovery from cyanide solutions etc.

    ii ) PRECIPITATION
    Precipitation reactions are widely used to recover metal values or to remove impurities from process streams and waste waters. Many hydrometallurgical processes contain one or more precipitation steps. For instance, hydroxide is used to precipitate iron from acid streams, neutralize acid streams for disposal, recover nickel and cobalt hydroxide from sulfate liquors, and remove metals from wastewater. Platinum group metals are also recovered from acidic leach solutions by precipitation.

    Sulfide is another common compound used in precipitation steps. Hydrogen sulfide is used to recover copper from copper-bearing streams and nickel and cobalt from acid sulfate liquors. Sodium hydrosulfide and calcium sulfide are widely used to remove zinc, copper, lead, silver, and cadmium from waste streams.
    Iii}

    CEMENTATION

    Cementation is a specialized precipitation process in which a more reactive metal is used to remove a more noble metal from solution. Copper cementation has been used extensively to recover copper. Gold and silver are recovered using zinc dust cementation.

    3)

    METAL RECOVERY

    Metal recovery is the final step in a hydrometallurgical process. Metals suitable for sale as raw materials are often directly produced in the metal recovery step. Sometimes, however, further refining is required if ultrahigh purity metals are to be produced. The primary types of metal recovery processes are electrolysis, gaseous reduction, and precipitation. For example, a major target of hydrometallurgy is copper, which is conveniently obtained by electrolysis. Cu2+ ions reduce at mild potentials, leaving behind other contaminating metals such as Fe2+ and Zn2+.

    SUMMARY OF LEACHIG PROCESS

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