Hydrogen reduction of copper bleed solution from an Indian copper smelter for producing high purity copper powders

A bench scale investigation on the hydrogen reduction of a highly acidic copper bleed solution to produce high purity copper powder is discussed in this paper. A titanium lined autoclave of 1 L capacity was used for this study. The parameters optimized on the bench scale were validated by performing hydrogen reduction of copper in a larger autoclave. Effect of various parameters viz., time of reduction, temperature of reduction, pressure variation, iron dose, volume of copper solution etc. were studied. Experiments were performed with synthetic and actual solution obtained from a copper plant. A 99% copper powder recovery is achieved by hydrogen reduction at a pressure of about 2400 kPa, reaction temperature of 453 K, stirring speed of 400 rpm for a reaction time of 2 h. The fine copper powder thus obtained had a good metallic lustre. Kinetics of reduction of copper was examined by drawing samples at different times and analyzing the percent copper reduction. The copper depleted solution was further purified with respect to the residual copper and can be processed for the recovery of nickel powder by hydrogen reduction.Properties of the copper powder obtained from the large-scale experiments from actual plant and synthetic solutions have been evaluated for powder metallurgical applications. The raw and annealed copper powders obtained from the synthetic copper solution were found to have an apparent density of 3.50 g/cm³, flow rate 35.6 g/min, hydrogen loss 0.2%, purity 99.8% and green density of 8.6 g/ cm³ while the powder from actual plant solution was found to have an apparent density of 3.59 g/ cm³, flow rate 46.0 g/min, hydrogen loss 0.6%, purity 99.4% and green density 8.6 g/ cm³. Thus, the copper powder produced by hydrogen reduction was found suitable for the application.