Cobalt is an extremely important strategic metal, mainly used in cemented carbide, ceramic color glaze, battery material, superalloy and magnetic material and other fields. In recent years, as the country vigorously develops the new energy industry, the cobalt smelting industry has developed vigorously, and the market demand for cobalt raw materials has become increasingly strong.
Africa's Congo (Kinshasa) is rich in copper and cobalt resources, and its cobalt reserves account for nearly 50% of the world's total reserves. In recent years, more and more cobalt smelting and production enterprises in my country have built local factories in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to process and produce crude cobalt salts in order to reduce production costs and raw material transportation costs. It has gradually become an industry trend to replace the import of cobalt concentrate with crude cobalt salt.
The currently commonly used crude cobalt salt production process has a series of shortcomings such as unsatisfactory impurity removal effect, high consumption of auxiliary materials, and low cobalt grade of the product. It is urgent to develop a new process or optimize the existing crude cobalt salt production process to reduce production. cost, improve product quality and enhance product competitiveness.
In this paper, a cobalt-containing and low-copper raffinate in Congo (Kinshasa) was used as raw material, and high-grade crude cobalt hydroxide was prepared through the process of impurity removal-first-stage cobalt precipitation-second-stage cobalt precipitation-filtration washing-flash drying. Different from the usual process of returning the second-stage cobalt underflow to the impurity removal or leaching process to ensure product quality, this paper returns all the second-stage cobalt underflow to the first-stage cobalt as reaction seeds, thereby greatly improving the recovery rate of cobalt and increasing the crude oil. The output and comprehensive recovery rate of cobalt hydroxide products, and its cobalt content is over 39%.
1 Raw material equipment and test method
1.1 Raw materials for production
The cobalt-containing raffinate used in the production is a low-copper cobalt sulfate solution obtained from a copper-cobalt ore in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after grinding, leaching, and extraction. The main chemical components are shown in Table 1…
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