Recovery of matte from copper slag by using rubber seed oil as green reductant
Haipei Zhang, Bo Li, Yonggang Wei, Hua Wang
Abstract
The traditional fossil reductant used in the copper slag cleaning process cannot fulfill the requirements of sustainable development of the copper industry and environmental protection. Therefore, a new approach of employing renewable rubber seed oil (RSO) instead of a non-renewable fossil reductant to clean copper slag (reduce magnetite concentration and improve matte recovery) was put forward in this study. The cracking characteristics of RSO at high temperature and the effects of technical parameters (such as reduction temperature, oil amount and settling time) on the copper loss, magnetite concentration and RSO utilization degree were thoroughly investigated. The results indicated that the cracking products of RSO at high temperature were mainly composed of C and H 2 . Under the conditions of a temperature of 1250 °C, an injection of 4 mL of RSO, and a settling time of no less than 1.5 h, the content of magnetite was reduced to less than 1 wt.%, and the content of copper in the upper level of the slag was lowered to be less than 0.57 wt.%, which met the criteria for discarding slag industrially. The copper slag cleaning by RSO is a process of carbon neutrality . The results provide a theoretic basis for the application of bioenergy in non-ferrous metal smelting process.