Prof. Evgueni Jak, Dr. Taufiq Hidayat, Dr. Denis Shishin, Dr. Ata Fallah Mehrjardi, Dr. Jiang Chen, Prof. Peter Hayes
Our industrialised society is currently facing significant challenges including resource scarcity, mobility
issues, climate change. For pyrometallurgical processes these issues can be directly translated
into increasingly complex concentrates and recycling feed streams with increasing levels of impurities
that require complex metallurgical solutions; pressures to save energy, to increase productivity,
to improve environmental outcomes and to establish resource resilience in a clean world with the
optimised asset base. Improvements in the metal production and recycling can be made through
more energy efficient metal smelting technologies, progressive integration of primary metal production
and recycling, development and implementation of feed forward control and optimisation of
pyrometallurgical processes based on fundamental thermodynamic and phase equilibria principles.
Key to the development of the feed forward approach and process optimisation is access to accurate
and robust thermodynamic models of complex multi-component, multi-phase systems that are developed
through an integrated, experimental phase equilibria and thermodynamic modelling approach.
New strategic opportunities for industry are now available through the recent significant
progress in computer power and analytical tools as well as advances in thermodynamic and kinetics
theory, and experimental methodology. Using new experimental methods key data are being obtained
and advanced thermodynamic computer-based models are being developed for both copper
and lead smelting systems having major elements Cu-Pb-Fe-S-O-Si with the addition of slagging
elements Al, Ca, Mg and selected minor elements, including, Zn, As, Sn, Sb, Bi, Ag, Au. The copper
research program is supported by a consortium of industry sponsors. Examples of the new experimental
and modelling results as well as application of these advanced tools to achieving productivity
improvements and energy savings are given in the paper.
Experimental and modelling research in support of energy savings and improved productivity in non-ferrous metal production and recycling