how does it work....wanted an overview of a typical copper smelter plant....the differents parts of it...n there working in brief....
Simply put, it is where the copper ore is melted. Elements are added to remove impurities and then elements are added to for the desired alloy. Tin is added with other elements to form different types of Bronze. Zinc is added to make types of Brass.
its where copper ore is melted to form copper.. the product has to undergo further purifications..
a million. extracting ore from floor (mining expenses) two. crushing/grinding to unencumber copper minerals (milling expenses) three. extracting copper minerals (metallurgical expenses) four. transport listen to smelter five. smelting expenses These expenses are a blend of labour, capital creation & offerings. Before all this occurs there are the expenses of exploration, mine making plans and mine progress. After all this occurs there's the fee of rehabilitation and environmental tracking.
I can't give you a full overview, but I can tell you what I know from my metallurgy classes so far. For copper-bearing oxides, simple leaching can be done with acid on an ore heap, which can be collected and then put through an electrowinning process to reduce the Cu. This is the cheap way to extract copper. The expensive way is through pyrometallurgical means, which entails crushing and grinding the copper ore (usually chalcopyrite or bornite) and then using froth flotation to separate the copper-bearing minerals from the rest. Then, the concentrate is fed into a furnace at smelted, and a number of reactions occur. There is also quite a lot more processing, like passing oxygen through the matte to drive out the sulphur (creating 98% pure copper), followed by passing natural gas through to drive out the oxygen (achieving 99% purity). Finally, the copper is electrorefined to achieve 99.99% purity, which is commodity-grade. This is a very simplified description.
*Copper Smelting Process: Historically, the most abundant copper bearing ore was called chalcopyrite, CuFeS2. This ore is first enriched by a process called flotation. Powdered ore is mixed water as a slurry and then further mixed with oil and a chemical called amyl xanthate. Compressed air is then blown through the mixture. The flotation process is dependent on pine oil droplets, but it's really xanthate-coated chalcopyrite grains sticking to air bubbles on their way up and over the tank.
