emew Blog

Enhanced methods for nickel recovery from low-grade ores and bleed streams

Posted by Sara Wollschlaeger on Sep 6, 2017 5:09:46 PM

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. 

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Topics: nickel, Refinery Optimization

Electrowinning Nickel: The Moody Metal

Posted by Trevor Bergfeldt on Feb 28, 2017 4:10:49 PM

Electrowinning is the process of ‘winning’ dissolved metals from solution by passing an electrical current through an electrolyte containing said metal.  The fundamentals of the electrowinning process have been discussed in a previous blog.  The relative ease of recovery depends on the electrochemical potential of the target metal relative to the Standard Hydrogen Electrode (SHE) which is defined by the following reaction:

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Topics: electrowinning, nickel, emew, Refinery Optimization

Nickel Cathode Harvesting Demonstration

Posted by Alex Barshai on Feb 23, 2017 11:10:58 AM
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Topics: electrowinning, nickel, emew, Refinery Optimization

Liberating Copper and Nickel: A True Story

Posted by Dora Ip on Nov 10, 2016 5:21:07 PM

What pops into your mind when you see the word, "liberation"?

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The word liberation comes from the latin word, liberatus, which literally means "to set free" or "to deliver", and can easily apply to myriad of different topics from politics and religion to science and industry.

Particularly in the copper industry, the word liberation applies to the act of freeing copper specifically from refinery bleed electrolyte. The process that starts with mining and carries on through smelting and electrorefining is complex with many process operations.  Let's take a closer look at the story of 'liberating copper'.  

On average, mined ore contains about 1% copper and in order to recover this copper from the rock it requires several physical and chemical processing and refining steps in order to produce market ready copper metal.

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Topics: copper, nickel, Refining, Refinery Optimization