Abstract
The physical, chemical, mineralogical and morphological characteristic of the waste copper smelter dust (CSD) from Palabora Copper (PTY), Limpopo, South Africa, has been reported in the open literature. The bulk of this material falls within the −53 µm particle size fraction with a copper weight percent of 18.02 as determined with the XRF. The high presence of reactive gangue minerals such as mullite (42.97 wt%) and quartz (11.45 wt%) necessitates that the waste CSD be first upgraded of its copper value in the falcon gravity concentrator before subsequent hydrometallurgical treatment. As an initial step, a sample preparation was carried out to make the sample amenable to both real density determination and copper upgrade experiment, thus resulting in 97% of the particles passing the 300 µm sieve aperture (d97 = 300). The laser particle size analyzer (LPSA) was used to analyze the d97 = 300 and the results showed a %change from 90.82% to 95.59%, with a real density of 2.830 for the waste CSD. The result of the copper upgrade showed that test 8 with treatment combination of 80 rpm and 4.5 l/min gave the highest % copper grade of 1.37 which is still less than the %grade of copper in the feed(1.49%). It thus lead to the recommendation that another type of centrifugal separator that will allow the introduction of the feed as slurry so that the pulp density and feed rate can factored into the whole upgrade experiment, consequently reducing the significant amount of losses and the chances of an improved grade and recovery of copper from this waste CSD.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would wish to thank the Council for scientific and industrial research (CSIR), Pretoria, South Africa, for the financial support it gave in the course of this project, while also appreciating PC for providing the waste CSD used for this study. We also thank Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) and Vaal university of Technology (VUT) both in South Africa, for allowing the use of their facilities.
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© 2018 The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society
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Okanigbe, D.O., Popoola, A.P.I., Adeleke, A.A., Popoola, O.M. (2018). Upgrading the Copper Value in a Waste Copper Smelter Dust with the Falcon Gravity Concentrator. In: Sun, Z., et al. Energy Technology 2018 . TMS 2018. The Minerals, Metals & Materials Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72362-4_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72362-4_25
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