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2011-Sustainable Industrial Processing Summit
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Editors: | Florian K |
Publisher: | Flogen Star OUTREACH |
Publication Year: | 2012 |
Pages: | 828 pages |
ISBN: | 978-0-9879917-0-6 |
ISSN: | 2291-1227 (Metals and Materials Processing in a Clean Environment Series) |
The mexican mining company Minera-Mexico operates the smelting complex La Caridad, with El Teniente and Flash furnaces, a Pierce-Smith converter and a final electric slag cleaning furnace for the recovery of metal values, mainly copper. In this prometallurgical complex, concentrates from different plants from the company with different chemical and mineralogical compositions of copper and other elements are treated. The final discarded slag presents a typical content of around 1 wt% Cu and a gradual increase in the Mo content of around 0.4 wt% by some of the new available concentrates.In this work a global characterization of the copper pyrometallurgical slags from this plant is done, as a function of the chemical composition of the charges and the operation parameters in the smelting complex and compared with thermodynamic calculations for predicting the copper losses in the slags. Additionally, a slag cleaning treatment in an experimental Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) is carried out, using coke injection and also additives as CaF2 and MgO, with an effect on the increase in the metal values recovery. The characterization of the final slags showed a high metal recovery in the slag cleaning treatment with losses of copper of less than 0.5 %, mainly depending on the physicochemical form, and the lower losses by the use of additives in the slag with an effect of reducing its viscosity. Special interest is made in the behavior of Mo, but it seems its recovery should be made in previous stages. The final content of Mo in the cleaned slags was reduced in lower extent than that of Cu.