Abstract
The mining industry has faced significant challenges to maintaining copper production technically, economically, and environmentally viable. Some of the major limitations that must be overcome in the coming years are the copper ore grade decline due to its intense exploitation, the increasing requirements for environmental protection, and the need to expand and construct new tailings dams. Furthermore, the risk of a supply crisis of critical metals, such as antimony and bismuth, has prompted efforts to increase their extraction from secondary resources in copper production. Therefore, improving conventional processes and developing new technologies is crucial to satisfying the world’s metal demands, while respecting the policies of environmental organizations. Hence, it is essential that the chemical composition of each copper production stage is known for conducting these studies, which may be challenging due to the huge variability of concentration data concerning the ore extraction region, the process type, and the operational conditions. This paper presents a review of chemical composition data of the main stages of copper production from sulfide minerals, such as (1) copper minerals, (2) flotation tailings, (3) flotation concentrates, (4) slags and (5) flue dust from the smelting/converting stage, (6) copper anodes, (7) anode slimes, (8) contaminated electrolytes from the electrorefining stage, (9) electrolytes cleaned by ion-exchange resins, and (10) elution solutions from the resins. In addition, the main contributions of recent works on copper production are summarized herein. This study is focused on production sites from Chile since it is responsible for almost one-third of the world’s copper production.
Highlights
The main of this review is the development offorthese studies, knowing the chemical composition of objective each processing to assist future works on optimization of copper production in Chile, making the processes stage is essential; one of the limitations in the studies on copper production is the huge economically and environmentally viable, and allowing the recovery of valuable and critical variability of concentration data depending onwhich the region where copper is economy
The risk of a supply crisis of critical metals, such as antimony and bismuth, will encourage companies to extract these metals from secondary resources in copper production
The present paper provides a review of composition data of the main stages of Chilean copper production from sulfide minerals and the recent advances in the development of technologies for copper mining reported in the literature
Summary
Copper is a metal that presents several industrial applications due to its attractive properties, such as electrical conductivity, thermal conductibility, and ductility. For the development of these studies, knowing the chemical composition of each processing stage is essential; one of the limitations in the studies on copper production is the huge variability of concentration data depending on the region where copper is obtained, the process type, and the operational conditions. The main of this review is the development offorthese studies, knowing the chemical composition of objective each processing to assist future works on optimization of copper production in Chile, making the processes stage is essential; one of the limitations in the studies on copper production is the huge economically and environmentally viable, and allowing the recovery of valuable and critical variability of concentration data depending onwhich the region where copper is economy. Data on the chemical composition of oxide copper ores from Chile may be found in the literature [60]
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