Abstract
Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) offers a significant resource for precious metals such as gold and silver. To maximize precious metal recoveries and sustainable use their behavior during WEEE smelting with copper as the collector metal needs to be characterized. This study experimentally determines the distributions of gold and silver between metallic copper and FeOx-SiO2-Al2O3 slag (LCu/s[Me] = [Me]Copper/[Me]Slag) in alumina-saturation over the oxygen potential range of 10-5–10-10 atm at 1300 °C. The experiments were conducted employing equilibration / quenching followed by major element analysis by Electron Probe Micro-Analysis (EPMA) and trace element analysis by Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) techniques. Our results show silver distribution increased exponentially from 30 to 1000 as a function of decreasing oxygen partial pressure. Gold distribution was 105 at pO2 = 10-5 atm and >106 at pO2 = 10-6–10-10 atm.
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Avarmaa, K., O’Brien, H., Taskinen, P. (2016). Equilibria of Gold and Silver between Molten Copper and FeOx-SiO2-Al2O3 Slag in WEEE Smelting at 1300 °C. In: Reddy, R.G., Chaubal, P., Pistorius, P.C., Pal, U. (eds) Advances in Molten Slags, Fluxes, and Salts: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Molten Slags, Fluxes and Salts 2016. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48769-4_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48769-4_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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