Technical Articles

Last updated: 2026-10-25 Selecting lithium processing plant equipment comes down to matching each unit operation to your feed: brine projects typically need solar ponds or MVR (mechanical vapour recompression) concentration, boron and magnesium removal, solvent extraction, and crystallizers sized to deliver battery-grade Li2CO3 (lithium carbonate) at 99.5% purity or better, while hard-rock plants pivot on…

Last updated: 2026-10-25 Mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) typically reduces evaporator energy demand to 15-30 kWh per tonne of water evaporated, roughly 20-40 times less than the 600+ kWh/t steam-equivalent consumed by a conventional multi-effect train. Instead of dumping clean water vapor from the boiling liquor, an MVR system compresses that vapor a few degrees hotter…

Last updated: 2026-10-25 Copper solvent extraction transfers 90–95% of dissolved copper from pregnant leach solution (PLS) into an organic phase in every well-designed extraction stage, making it the decisive separation step between heap leaching and electrowinning (EW). This pillar overview distils circuit configuration, key design parameters, extractant selection, and field-proven troubleshooting — the same ground…

Last updated: 2026-10-25 Heap leaching recovers 60–90% of the copper in oxide ores and 55–80% of the gold in crush-agglomerated precious-metal ores, at a fraction of the cost of milling. Because crushed ore stacked on an engineered pad behaves as a self-renewing packed-bed reactor, success depends on pad design, agglomeration, irrigation and solution management —…

Last updated: 2026-10-24 Sourcing mining equipment Zambia projects can actually run means planning around a 6–10 week ocean-plus-inland transit from Asian load ports through Dar es Salaam or Durban, a 400 V/50 Hz grid interface, and ZEMA permitting that must begin before fabrication. This guide maps the Copperbelt’s geology and process routes, the equipment a…

Last updated: 2026-10-24 A disciplined acid consumption calculation turns scattered assay data into one number that decides reagent economics: on the illustrative pyrite concentrate below, 98% sulphide oxidation generates about 960 kg H2SO4 per tonne (dry basis) while gangue and precipitate sinks absorb roughly 190 kg, leaving a 770 kg/t surplus the plant must neutralize…

Last updated: 2026-10-24 Most autoclave scaling failures announce themselves weeks before a choke: when the temperature spread between adjacent compartments widens by more than 5 °C (9 °F) at steady feed, scale is already constricting slurry flow and heat transfer. This guide explains the chemistry behind scale formation in POX and HPAL leaching circuits, the…

Last updated: 2026-10-24 In the POX vs biooxidation decision, kinetics is the first divide: pressure oxidation (POX) converts sulfide-hosted gold concentrates in 1–2 hours at 190–230 °C (374–446 °F), while bacterial oxidation needs 4–6 days at 40–80 °C (104–176 °F). Both routes liberate refractory gold for downstream carbon-in-leach (CIL) recovery, but they differ sharply in…

Last updated: 2026-10-24 A pressure oxidation autoclave operating on refractory pyrite or arsenopyrite concentrate typically runs at 190–230 °C (375–445 °F) and 3,000–5,000 kPa (435–725 psi) gauge, converting sulfide sulfur to sulfate so that encapsulated gold becomes amenable to cyanidation. This guide sets out the design envelope, zone-by-zone materials selection, operating parameters, and cost drivers…

Last updated: 2026-10-23 Battery recycling hydrometallurgy typically recovers 95–98% of the nickel and cobalt in end-of-life lithium-ion cells as battery-grade sulfate salts, based on recovery ranges reported in the peer-reviewed literature. The logic is straightforward: shredded cells become black mass, sulfuric acid leaching dissolves the nickel, cobalt, manganese and lithium, solvent extraction purifies and separates…