Technical Articles

Last updated: 2026-10-23 Crystallizer design is, before anything else, a mass-balance exercise: in the worked example below, a single cooling pass from 60 to 25 °C recovers 48.8% of the dissolved copper sulfate as CuSO4·5H2O crystals. Yield is fixed by the solubility curve and the mass balance; crystal size is fixed by supersaturation control and…

Last updated: 2026-10-23 Entrainment in mixer settler circuits is one of the most controllable sources of solvent loss: a healthy copper SX plant typically holds organic-in-aqueous entrainment below 50 ppm (mg/L) on a volumetric carry-over basis. When levels climb past 100–200 ppm, solvent inventory bleeds out, product purity degrades, and crud growth accelerates. This guide…

Last updated: 2026-10-23 For most hydrometallurgical liquors above roughly 5 t/day (5.5 short tons/day) of crystal output, the continuous vs batch crystallizer decision defaults to continuous: a mixed-suspension mixed-product-removal (MSMPR) or Oslo circuit typically cuts crystallization cost per tonne by 20–35% versus batch operation (illustrative, 2026 equipment pricing). That default is overturned only by frequent…

Last updated: 2026-10-23 Filter press cycle time converts installed plate area into tonnes per day: at an illustrative 60-minute cycle, a 150 m² mining press produces roughly 170 t/d of dry solids, and a 45-minute cycle lifts the same hardware to about 230 t/d. This guide shows process engineers how to compute that figure from…

Last updated: 2026-10-22 Zero liquid discharge (ZLD) is a water management strategy that recovers virtually all water from an industrial effluent and converts the dissolved solids into a dry, handleable salt. A well-designed ZLD train for mine water typically recovers 90–98% of the incoming water as distillate and turns the remainder into solid salts, eliminating…

Last updated: 2026-10-22 The specific energy consumption evaporator designers should plan for ranges from about 620–700 kWh per tonne of water evaporated for a single-effect unit (quoted as steam-equivalent thermal energy), through roughly 200–225 kWh/t for a four-effect multiple effect evaporator, down to 15–40 kWh/t of electricity for a mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) system. This…

Last updated: 2026-10-22 Effective evaporator scaling control is the difference between a train that holds design capacity for years and one that loses 15–30% of it within weeks: a 1 mm calcium sulfate (CaSO4) layer adds enough heat-transfer resistance to cut duty by that proportion at fixed temperature drive (illustrative). This guide covers the scale…

Last updated: 2026-10-22 For the MVR vs multiple effect evaporator decision, the numbers are decisive: mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) evaporates water at roughly 15–40 kWh of electricity per tonne, while a multiple effect evaporator (MEE) consumes live steam at a steam economy of about 0.7–0.8 per effect. For most hydrometallurgical plants with reliable grid power,…

Last updated: 2026-10-22 MVR evaporator selection — the sizing and choice of a mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) evaporator — comes down to matching three numbers: the evaporation duty in tonnes of water per hour, the boiling-point elevation of the liquor, and the compression ratio the compressor can deliver. Get this match right and the plant…

Last updated: 2026-10-21 The SX-EW process — solvent extraction followed by electrowinning — converts leached copper solutions directly into LME Grade A cathode without ever melting metal, and it supplies roughly one-fifth of world refined copper output today (an approximate share, per USGS/ICSG reporting). This guide walks owners, investors, and process engineers through every stage…