Enhanced Recycling of Waste Copper Smelter Dust from Existing and Proposed Smelter Plant at the Palabora Copper (pty) ltd, impopo, South Africa

Abstract

The whole facilities at the Palabora Copper (PTY) Ltd (PC), Limpopo, South Africa (i.e. both existing and new) are under obligation to comply with the new plant MES by the 1st of April, 2020. At the moment all processes on the PC mine conform to the MES for existing plant with the exception of the copper smelter and the associated sulphuric acid plant. Despite considerable investment by PC over the last few years in equipment and maintenance, due to the short comings of the copper smelting technology employed on site, certain relevant MES have proven to currently be unachievable. The generation of the waste CSD is considered a global issue and at PC the direct smelting process option is the recycling method currently being used to manage the generated waste CSD at the copper smelting plant. This recycling method is neither cost effective nor energy efficient and it leads to the production of worthless residues. As a result, an enhanced hydrometallurgical based recycling process option is recommended as an appropriate recycling process option. Hence, it was concluded that an industrial scale centrifugal separator like the Knelson or Falcon concentrators be stationed in the existing and proposed plants as a separate but integral part of the ore processing system, so as to reduced/removed the reactive materials it often contains before subjecting it to a hydrometallurgical and Nano technological processing, in order to recover the copper value in it as precipitates of nanoparticles.