Copper Beneficiation Plant

In copper ore mining process, the raw material is first quarried from the copper mountain and the raw materials are got. Next is to process and mine the raw copper materials. They are sent into jaw crusher for primary crushing through vibrating feeder. After the raw materials are crushed into coarse ones, with belt conveyor, they enter into impact crusher or cone crusher for the secondary crushing. There are two different copper ores, the oxide ore and the sulfide ore. The oxide ores are commonly leached, while the sulfide ores are beneficiated in flotation machine. Then the following mining and processing is divided into two types.

The fine sulfide ore (~-0.5 mm) is going to froth flotation machine for recovery of copper. The coarser ore goes to the heap leach, where the copper is subjected to a dilute sulfuric acid solution to dissolve the copper. Then the leach solution containing the dissolved copper is subjected to a process called solvent extraction. The solvent extraction process concentrates and purifies the copper leach solution so the copper can be recovered at a high electrical current efficiency by the electro winning cells. It does this by adding a chemical reagent to the solvent extraction tanks which selectively binds with and extracts the copper, is easily separated from the copper (stripped), recovering as much of the reagent as possible for re-use. The concentrated copper solution is dissolved in sulfuric acid and sent to the electrolytic cells for recovery as copper plates.

Advantages

1. When the mud content of selected ore stones is not so high, after coarse crushing, the crushed ores can come into autogenous mill to be next crushed;

2. When the ore contains small objects such as iron, these objects will not affect the normal production process of crushing flow;

3. There has no strict requirements for moisture content in ores. Wet autogenous mill has less dust and does not need to be equipped with dust collector;

4. Preliminary Statistics shows that this process flow does not need medium or fine crushing workshop, screening workshop or parts of belt conveyor so that investment can be reduced.