What Is a Refinery?

An ore refinery is a factory that uses metallurgical technology to extract metal elements from ore, and then refines, refines and alloys the crude product, then casts it into ingots and processes it to obtain metal materials with the required composition, structure, and specifications.

Developed from ancient pottery. The first is copper smelting. The melting point of copper is relatively low. With the development of pottery, the temperature required for pottery is getting higher and higher to reach the melting point of copper. In the process of pottery production, in some places with copper ore In making pottery, copper was naturally discovered as a by-product. After that, various metals were discovered and refined by ore refining.

Ancient people used the earth method (early pyrometallurgy) to perform preliminary refining of ore. This method was slow and inefficient. In modern times, people began to use science and technology to invent hydrometallurgy and electrometallurgy to refine and refine ore, which greatly increased production efficiency and established various types of ore refineries.

Pyrometallurgy

Pyrometallurgy is a metallurgical process performed at high temperatures. Some or all of the minerals in the ore undergo a series of physical and chemical changes at high temperature to generate another form of compound or element, which are respectively enriched in gas, liquid or solid products to achieve the metal, gangue and other impurities to be extracted The purpose of separation. The heat energy required to realize the pyrometallurgical process is usually supplied by fuel combustion, but also by chemical reactions in the process. For example, the oxidative roasting and smelting of sulfide ore does not require heating by fuel; the metal thermal reduction process is also self-contained. Heated.

There are four types of pyrometallurgical processes: extraction metallurgy, chloride metallurgy, spray metallurgy, and vacuum metallurgy.

Pyrometallurgy includes: drying, roasting, roasting, melting, refining, distillation and other processes.

Refinery

Hydrometallurgy

Hydrometallurgy is a metallurgical process performed in solution. The temperature of hydrometallurgy is not high, generally lower than 100 . In the high-temperature and high-pressure process in modern hydrometallurgy, the temperature is only about 200 , and in rare cases, the temperature can reach 300 . Hydrometallurgy includes: leaching, purification, metal preparation and other processes.

1. Leaching Treat the ore or concentrate with a suitable solvent to make the metal to be extracted into a certain ionic (cation or complex anion) form into the solution, while gangue and other impurities are not dissolved. This process is called leaching. After leaching, sedimentation and filtration were performed to obtain a metal (ion) -containing leaching solution and an insoluble residue (leaching slag) made of gangue mineral silk. For some difficult-to-leach ore or concentrate, pre-treatment is often required before leaching to convert the extracted metal into a compound or salt that is easy to leaching. For example, sulfated roasting to convert to soluble sulfate is a common pre-treatment method.

2. Purification In the leaching process, there are often some metal or non-metal impurities entering the solution together with the extracted metal. The process of removing these impurities from the solution is called purification.

3. The process of extracting the metal from the purification liquid by methods such as replacement, reduction, and electrowinning of the metal.

Electrometallurgy

Electrometallurgy is a method of extracting metals using electrical energy. According to the use of electrical energy effects, electrometallurgy is divided into electrothermal metallurgy and electrochemical metallurgy.

1. Electrothermal metallurgy is a method that uses electrical energy to convert it into thermal energy for smelting. In the process of electrothermal metallurgy, according to the nature of its physical and chemical changes, it is not much different from the pyrometallurgical process. The main difference between the two is only the source of heat energy during smelting.

2. Electrochemical metallurgy (electrolysis and electrowinning) is the use of electrochemical reactions to precipitate metals from solutions or melts containing metal salts. The former is called solution electrolysis, such as the electrolytic refining of thorium and the electrolysis of zinc, which can be included in the category of wet metallurgy; the latter is called molten salt electrolysis, which not only uses the chemical effect of electrical energy, but also uses electrical energy to convert it into thermal energy. Heating metal salts to make them melt,

Therefore, it can also be included in the category of pyrometallurgy. The production process for extracting metals from ores or concentrates often has both a fire process and a wet process, even if the process is dominated by fire, such as the fire smelting of sulfide pot concentrates, and finally A wet electrolytic refining process is also required; in wet zinc smelting, zinc sulfide concentrate also needs to be subjected to pre-refining treatment by high temperature oxidation roasting.