Copper electrolytic blister copper refining process

It is a relatively mature process to use the electrolytic refining process to purify blister copper and recover the rare and precious metals contained in it. However, unlike the mineral blister copper, the blister copper produced by the waste circuit board recycling industry and the blister copper produced by using copper as a precious metal smelting collector contain much more precious metals such as gold, silver and platinum. Rare and precious metals contained in mineral blister copper. Therefore, new electrolysis processes should be developed to suit the industry characteristics. Otherwise, it will cause more valuable metals to occupy more and lose more.

Copper Electrolysis Machine

In the prior art, the general situation is to smelt and cast blister copper into anode, pure copper plate (or titanium plate, stainless steel plate) as cathode, and copper sulfate aqueous solution as electrolyte, which is electrolyzed by direct current. During the electrolysis process, the anode blister copper is continuously dissolved into the electrolyte. The precious metals such as gold, silver and platinum in the anode form anode slime, which falls to the bottom of the electrolytic cell and is collected and processed regularly. The copper ions in the electrolyte are precipitated into metallic copper at the cathode.

The circulation mode of the electrolyte is as follows: the bottom enters the tank and the top goes out, the electrolyte overflowing from the tank flows into the low level tank, then pumped into the high level tank, and then flows back to the electrolytic tank from the high level tank.

Compared with ordinary copper electrolytic refining, one of the characteristics of blister copper electrolysis recovered from waste circuit boards is that the anode contains more impurities, especially the precious metal content (the blister copper generally contains 0.5-2.5% of precious metals) . During copper electrolysis, the precious metal forms anode slime and falls off the blister copper anode. Due to the high content, it is easy to fall to the cathode copper plate. Cause precious metal loss and affect the quality of the cathode copper plate.