Blue Cube's Controlled Zinc Dosage for Copper Cementation

16 May 2012 by Blue Cube Systems

Scorpion Zinc is the first mine-to-metal operation to commercially apply a purely hydro-metallurgical process route to exploit a zinc oxide ore body. Copper and Nickel are not co-extracted during the applied solvent extraction (SX) process and are recycled back to the leaching circuit. To prevent a built-up of impurities, copper is removed through cementation from the pregnant liquor solution (PLS).

The cementation process is induced by the addition of zinc dust followed by filtration to remove the cemented copper from the solution. The dosing rate of zinc dust is controlled by measuring the concentration of the remaining copper in the purified solution. The effective control of the zinc dust addition demands a high frequency of copper concentration data.

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