Investigating the Leaching Behavior of Copper from Chalcopyrite Concentrate in H2SO4/CuCl2 Media

The present paper is a detailed investigation of the dissolution behavior of copper from the chalcopyrite concentrate sample using a cupric chloride solution. Response surface modeling (RSM) in combination with d-optimal design (DOD) was utilized for modeling and optimizing the cupric chloride leaching process. Initially, a quadratic polynomial model was developed for the relationship between the recovery of copper and influential factors. The predictions indicated an excellent agreement with the experimental data (with R2 of 0.9399). Then, the effect of main factors including pH (1-4), liquid/solid ratio (2-7 mL/g), temperature (70-90 degrees C), CuCl2 concentration (6-35 g/L), and leaching time (0.5-16) were determined. The. findings demon hated that the temperature and CuCl2 concentration were the moil effective factors on the dissolution rule of copper from chalcopyrite sample, while the liquid/solid ratio had the lowest impact. The recovery of copper increased linearly with an increment in the liquid/solid ratio and the decrease in the pulp pH. Additionally, the recovery enhanced by increasing the temperature and CuCl2 concentration owing to generation of Cu-Cl complexes species and reached a plateau point and then almost remained unchanged. Meanwhile, it was observed that the recovery of copper was independent of the interaction between factors. Moreover; the optimization of leaching process was carried out by Design Expert (version 7) software and desirability function method and the highest recovery of copper was found to be about 86.1% at a pH of similar to 1.4, temperature of 89 degrees C, liquid/solid ratio of 6.8 mL/g, CuCl2 concentration of 21.79 g/L and leaching time of similar to 8 h.