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Challenges and Opportunities of a Lead Smelting Process for Complex Feed Mixture

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Part of the book series: The Minerals, Metals & Materials Series ((MMMS))

Abstract

Managing complex material streams within a lead smelting/reduction process has a long history at Aurubis. After modernization of the secondary lead smelter in 1991, Aurubis operates an electric furnace and a Peirce Smith converter to process complex secondary materials. This process links the copper and the lead metallurgy allowing Aurubis to properly combine primary and secondary process lines to optimize the processing of complex raw materials and smelter intermediates. However, combination of copper and lead metallurgy processing requires a continuous evaluation as raw material quality and composition varies. This paper describes Aurubis lead smelter processing and provides some fundamental considerations to optimize the lead processing, in particular with aspects related to speiss formation.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the management of Aurubis for the possibility to work on this particular topic and the permission to publish this. They would like also to thanks the colleagues who contributed to the comprehensive discussions. Special thanks to Dr. Mehmet Ayhan who fed his expertise to the work and raised a lot of challenging questions. The detailed review of Dr. Gerardo R. F. Alvear Flores helped to significantly improve the original version of this manuscript.

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Correspondence to Christoph Zschiesche .

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Zschiesche, C., Ayhan, M., Antrekowitsch, J. (2018). Challenges and Opportunities of a Lead Smelting Process for Complex Feed Mixture. In: Davis, B., et al. Extraction 2018. The Minerals, Metals & Materials Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95022-8_26

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