Copper Plant

Copper is an element that occurs in minor amounts in the earth’s crust. Estimates of average crustal prevalence are on the order of 0.0058 percent by weight. Deposits considered to be economically recoverable at current market prices may contain as little as 0.5 percent of copper or less, depending on the mining method, total reserves, and the geologic setting of the deposit. Here is the flow sheet on how to process copper from Zenith.
Copper Process Flow Sheet:
Copper ore 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 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.

Escondida Organic Growth Project 1(Chile)57.5%Copper