Oxygen pressure leaching of white metal

Sulfuric acid–oxygen pressure leaching of white metal was investigated at laboratory scale as an alternative to the pyrometallurgical Peirce–Smith converting to produce metallic copper. The main variables studied were temperature, concentration of sulfuric acid, partial pressure of oxygen, and time of leaching. The results indicated that most of the sulfur in the white metal is oxidized to sulfate in the range 105 °C to 150 °C. The concentration of sulfuric acid over 0.05 M, and oxygen partial pressure over 608 kPa had little effect on the dissolution of copper. The temperature was the most significant variable; below 130 °C copper dissolution was incomplete after 5 h of leaching while at 150 °C the dissolution was complete in 90 min. The dissolution of white metal proceeded in two stages through the formation of CuS as an intermediate compound and the kinetics of copper dissolution was analyzed by considering two consecutive reactions controlled by chemical reaction. The activation energies for the first and second stages were determined as 55 and 88 kJ/mol, respectively.