Three major copper ore dressing plants abroad: Pudahuel copper ore dressing plant, Pima ore dressing plant, Chuguicamata (chuguicamate) ore dressing plant, the following editors have their production capacity and beneficiation indicators Make an introduction.
Pima Concentrator
Located in California, USA, it was put into production in December 1956, and its current production capacity is 54,000 t/d. The Pima copper ore is produced in horn shale that contacts metamorphic rocks. The main copper minerals in the ore are chalcopyrite, chalcocite, bornite, and natural copper. The mine has two concentrators. The first ore dressing plant has a scale of 40,000 t/d and adopts a three-stage one closed-circuit crushing process, and the final crushed product size is -25mm. The rod mill for grinding is connected in series with the ball mill, and the overflow concentration of the classifier is 30%.
The flotation adopts a rough separation and a sweep separation. After the coarse concentrate is re-grinded, the copper-molybdenum mixed concentrate is obtained by three times of selection, and then the copper-molybdenum separation is carried out. Separation flotation includes copper-molybdenum separation roughing and six times beneficiation, and the separated tailings are copper concentrates. In the six beneficiations, the second beneficiation concentrate is regrinded, and then the other four beneficiations are performed in sequence to obtain molybdenum concentrate.
Beneficiation indicators: original ore copper grade 0.54%, molybdenum 0.014%; copper concentrate contains 27.3% copper; molybdenum concentrate contains 42.16% molybdenum; copper and molybdenum recovery rates are 84.44% and 62.9% (operations).
Pudahuel Copper Concentrator
Located in the west of Santiago, Chile, it was built in 1982 with a design capacity of 2500t/d; it adopts a leaching-extraction-electrowinning process. The plant processes copper ore from the Roaguire deposit. The ore includes oxide ore and sulfide ore. The oxide ore includes malachite and chrysocolla; and the sulfide ore includes chalcocite and bornite.
The beneficiation process of this plant is: (1) crush the ore to 6mm; (2) stir the ore with acid for acidification treatment; (3) pile the ore into a 2m high thin layer after a few hours of acidification treatment; (4) use Solution extraction, spray washing of remaining liquid; (5) Naturally discharge ore-containing rich liquid; (6) Stack and treat tailings; (7) Use solution extraction-electrolysis operation to enrich and recover copper. The copper recovery rate of oxide ore is 90%-95%; the copper recovery rate of sulfide ore is 40%-60%.
The extraction adopts secondary extraction and secondary back extraction, and the extraction agent is Lix-64N. The electrolysis uses 64 electrolytic cells, each with 64 lead-calcium alloy anodes, the current density of the electrolytic cell is 240A/m2, and the energy consumption is 1.95～1.99kw•h/kg (precipitated copper). The production capacity of the electrolysis plant is 47.5t/d copper cathode. The total annual output is 17,000 tons.
Chuguicamate Concentrator
Located in Rama City, Antofagasta Province, northern Chile. The Chuquicamata Copper Mine is the largest porphyry copper deposit in the world. The ore reserves are about 10 billion tons, and the copper metal content is 60 million tons. Since 1959, it has mainly processed sulfide ore, and sent oxidized ore for leaching. The plant has a production capacity of 130-160 thousand t/d. The main useful minerals in the ore are chalcopyrite and pyrite, followed by chalcopyrite, copper blue, sulphur arsenite, chlorocopperite, bornite and molybdenite.
The crushing is three-stage crushing, and 90% of the ore is crushed to less than 12mm. There are 12 series of grinding, each series of grinding is connected in series with a rod mill and a grid-type ball mill, grinding to a particle size of -0.074mm accounting for 60%. The coarse concentrate is reground to -0.043mm, accounting for 80% to 90%. The flotation adopts a rough separation once, the coarse concentrate is re-grinded and then be selected twice, and the sweeping concentrate is re-grinded and returned to the second beneficiation process. The second selected foam is the copper-molybdenum mixed concentrate.
The copper-molybdenum separation process is: the copper-molybdenum separation roughing foam is selected to obtain molybdenum concentrate for five times, and the separated roughing tailings are copper concentrate.
Beneficiation indicators: the original ore contains 2.1% copper, 0.05% molybdenum, 1.8% iron, and 0.06% arsenic; copper concentrate contains 40%-42% copper, 0.8% arsenic, and copper recovery rate 90%-92%; molybdenum concentrate contains Copper <0.25%, and Mo recovery rate is 65%.
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