Electrowinning – an introduction

Electrowinning is a process used to recover metals from a solution or an electrolyte, by means of an electrolytic chemical reaction. This occurs when an electric current passes from a cathode that's negatively charged to a positively charged anode through a metal-containing solution. During this process, the electrons reduce the metal ions in the solution to form a solid metal deposition on the cathode. The quality of the metal produced can vary depending on the individual process and may require further processing or refining.

Nickel powders are widely used in industrial applications worldwide, such as rechargeable batteries, manufacturing and powder metallurgy. In some cases, nickel powders are used to add a magnetic feature to a particular material. Nickel can be used in electroplating and coinage industries as well. But there is more to nickel powder, and there is something that you have probably never heard about until now.

While Elon Musk compares AI to “summoning the demon” and Bill Gates doesn’t “understand why some people are not concerned” that artificial intelligence slowly but steadily becomes a part of our daily lives.

Our mobile phones are equipped with Siri, Cortana or Google Now that assist us with daily tasks. Self-driven cars are already on our roads, driving thousands of miles with ZERO accidents (or at least they are not the reason for the accidents).

Retailers like Amazon and Target use a self-educating software that can anticipate your needs and offer you the next product to buy even before you know you need it.

How about these online customer support chats? Did you know that most of them are machines hiding behind human names? Many of them have the ability to learn and to adapt to the tone of questions in order to search company websites and present the right information to the customer.

As the world is advancing towards clean, sustainable energy sources, businesses in traditional resource industries can be faced with a moral dilemma – to sacrifice margins in favour of clean initiatives or continue using conventional equipment and carbon-based energy sources that ensure revenue maximization.

With much of the world rapidly progressing towards everything IoT, machine learning, and smart algorithms, many resource-based companies in industries such as mining, refining, and other industrial areas are still dragging their feet. The need is there, the technology is available – so what prevents some companies from jumping on the data analytics train?

Let’s look at some operational parameters that can be affected by lack of action and how technology can benefit the metal recovery industry.

In electroplating, powders can be a very bad thing, but sometimes bad can be good. We are going to discuss doing a ‘bad thing’, but doing it consistently well.

Electrocoagulation (EC) is an electrolytic process that is used mostly for wastewater and industrial process water treatment. Due to its unique ability to remove contaminants such as emulsified oils, suspended solids and dissolved metals, electrocoagulation has become one of the fastest growing technologies in this area. There are various devices and systems that comprise the basic principle of electrocoagulation which I would like to explain in this article.