Speaker
Description
Thermodynamic properties of phases and phase equilibria are the key to the analysis of pyrometallurgical processes and they enable to describe the limiting boundary conditions for metallurgical processes. The raw materials basis of non-ferrous metals needs an effective control of slag fluxing due to the unavoidable fact that the targeted metal values of, e.g., copper, nickel, lead and tin will be as minority components in the smelter feed compared to iron sulphides, gangue and hazardous elements. This means that the slag compositions will become more complex and the amount of produced slag is several times that of the metal production. This feature has also severe impact to the heat balance of the smelting where autogenous smelting becomes more and more difficult to maintain in industrial smelting vessels.
Thus, minimisation of the slag/metal ratio in smelting and effective fluxing strategies are the big challenges of the non-ferrous smelting and refining industry in the future which is additionally challenged by the massive use of secondaries required by the ethical use of natural resources and the Circular Economy. This is a specific need where computational thermodynamics helps us beyond the printed 3-component and constrained 4-component phase diagrams available in various compilations.
This paper will introduce the use of constrained phase equilibria in the process analysis where the boundary conditions are derived in a straightforward manner from the industrial processes and their characteristic features. The case studies have been taken from the copper and nickel smelting and refining industry.
| Speaker Country | Finland |
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