Way back in elementary school when you thought of nickel, the first image that popped into your head was probably that nice shiny 5¢ coin. Even though we hardly carry change purses anymore, nickel is still ever present in our day-to-day lives. From the shiny stainless steel trim on your building, to the knives in your kitchen, nickel is found everywhere.With nickel becoming favoured for use in transport, power generation, cell phones, food preparation, and medical equipment, it leads one to think about where all of this nickel is coming from. 

I recently learned that metal powders have the potential to be the future of renewable energy sources. This is a relatively new venture, and an area of interest for us, here at emew, since producing metal powders is something we do daily. I wanted to explore the topic of the production of metal powders and explain more about how they are produced to create this renewable fuel source.

Tea & Metal Recovery: An Unlikely Comparison

What do your morning cup of tea and a metal recovery plant have in common? Not a whole lot, is what you would hope! However, this is where you are mistaken. The simple act of steeping tea is, in fact, very similar to the process of leaching in metal recovery.

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.

1. What is electrowinning?

In a world that is increasingly demanding sustainability, nonferrous metal recycling has become a very important practice. Opting for recycling does not only mean being responsible for the environment and reducing the carbon footprint, it is also a very reasonable business in industries that rely on using non-renewable resources.

The electrowinning of copper is an electrolytic process that uses electricity to recover dissolved copper from solution as copper plate, also known as ‘cathode’.

Cu²⁺_(aq) + 2e^- -->Cu_(s)        (E⁰ = +0.34V)

Copper easily dissolves in acids including sulphuric, nitric and hydrochloric. Recovering copper cathode from acidic sulphate solutions using electrowinning is a well-known and fairly straightforward process that has been in commercial use since the late 19th century.