Hydrogen reduction of bleed stream of an Indian copper industry to produce nickel powder

Investigation on the synthesis of nickel powder by hydrogen reduction from a highly acidic solution i.e. copper bleed stream (CBS), from ICC Ghatsila has been reported here. Synthetic CBS having the similar chemical composition as that of actual bleed stream was used to optimize the parameters for the maximum recovery of nickel powder on bench scale. These parameters were substantiated by performing a few large-scale experiments under these optimized conditions for the synthesis of Ni powder. The properties of nickel powder such as compaction, green density, flowability, particle size and purity, produced from large-scale experiments using actual CBS have been evaluated for P/M applications. SEM shows that the particles are spherical in nature. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.