Kinetics of copper leaching from direct‑to‑blister copper flash smelting slag by sulfuric acid

Coppermaking from sulfide concentrates entails two major steps: smelting and converting. In continuous direct-to-copper smelting process these two steps are combined into one. The principal advantages of this process are: isolation of SO2 emission to a single, continuous, SO2-rich gas stream, minimization of energy consumption and minimization of capital and operating costs. Disadvantages of the process are that about 25% of the Cu entering a direct-to-copper smelting furnace ends up dissolved in the slag (when compared with < 10% in traditional Peirce–Smith converting) and the cost of recovering this Cu is significant. Decopperization process is based on the reduction of cuprous oxide and other metals, mainly lead and iron, in the liquid state in an electric furnace in the presence of coke and technological additives. This paper presents the results of laboratory tests on flash smelting slag leaching with sulfuric acid solutions. Hydrometallurgical treatment of the slag could be an alternative route to the presently used way of processing. The influence of a number of leaching parameters such as sulfuric acid concentration, amount of H2O2 added, liquid to solid phase (l/s) parameter and process temperature on the copper leaching efficiency was investigated. Under optimized process conditions, 95.6% of the copper contained in the original sample of slag was transferred into a solution. The experimental results obtained in the study were supplemented with the analysis of the kinetics of the copper leaching process from the flash smelting slag. The commonly known from the literature diffusion model and chemical reaction model were used. The activation energy of copper leaching from flash smelting slag was estimated in the range from 12.77 to 17.34 kJ/mol.