Tailor Made Basic Engineering By Thermodynamic Process Modeling In The Secondary Copper Metallurgy

Abstract:

Secondary copper facilities have to deal with a big variety of raw materials which are significantly different in respect of valuable metal content, trace elements and impurities. Furthermore, the providers of industrial equipment offer a diversity of vessels for smelting, converting, refining and recycling. For this reasons no two smelting facilities are exactly the same and have to be designed individually. Due to different suppliers, processes are normally designed part for part and optimized for a single step. As a result, a suboptimum is achieved in capacity, economy and ecology.The present paper shows the possibilities of process modeling in the secondary copper metallurgy for the engineering of a state-of-the-art recycling process. Aim of the modeling is to design the pyrometallurgical facilities as well as the material flows and energy balances. The amount of consumables and auxiliary materials should be calculated for an optimized process. In principle, the desired raw material composition and mix defines the process, but the vessel where it is charged as well as the addition time should be found in respect of minimum energy consumption. A well reasoned model is an interaction of thermodynamic software packages and empiric data. Automated calculations allow an easy mass and energy balancing based on Gibbs minimization. However, kinetic influences and/or insufficient thermodynamic data result in a difference between real and ideal behavior. These deviations can be neglected in some pyrometallurgical operations but have to be considered especially in case of kinetic controlled processes. The presented model shows how empiric data based on experience can be combined with the theoretical thermodynamic model to best possible reproduce the real process.

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