Selective recovery of copper and zinc from mine dump waters of mining enterprises in precipitates

Abstract

The acid mine dump waters at mining companies that mining the copper and copperzinc sulphide ore have the high concentrates of metals and classified in our view as the raw materials for selective recovery of metals in precipitates comparable in quality with concentrates of ores enrichment and suitable for further metallurgical processing. Authors have implemented three two-stage schemes for sequential extraction of copper and zinc: cementation-sulphide precipitation, galvanocoagulation-sulphide precipitation, precipitation-precipitation. Moreover, parameters of processes and quality of the obtained precipitates have described. The achieved copper recovery is 89% and 94% respectively with the application of cementation and galvanocoagulation, in sulphide precipitate exceeded 75%. Furthermore, the copper recovery from decoppering in precipitates amounted to more than 65%. Zinc-containing precipitates because of coprecipitation of iron, magnesium and calcium contain zinc from 14% to 28%, in two to three times less than the quality of conditioned zinc concentrates. The content of precipitates allows to apply them for additional charging to concentrates of enrichment or for the production of metals in metallurgical treatment. As a result of the studying the effect of reduced total salinity (S) on mass fraction of zinc in precipitate (β) with the constant concentration of zinc (SZn), the changes in concentration with constant salinity and reduction in total salinity (S) with constant ratio S/CZn, the following dependencies have obtained: , in the range of an index S from 4.5 to 90.0 g/L , where is a partial derivative of x to y, whereas the value z is fixed.