Use of membranes in copper hydrometallurgy

Usually, the recovery of metals from ore follows a flow sheet which includes the leaching operation, the filtration and the purification concentration. However, in this work a new processing method is described. It is an electromembrane process where the ore is inserted between two membranes. It is shown that an application of a current density gives rise to an efficiency recovery of copper using ion exchange membranes.

In this work, it was shown that an electric field can replace the role of an oxidant in a leaching process. Some gradients which appear during electroleaching, i.e. pH and conductivity, enhance the ion transport in the process, giving rise to good extraction yields combined with enrichment. The use of the membranes enables a selective process where two operation units are combined in one step.