Poster (EARTH)

[PE1-049] Study on the electro-refining of copper from copper-containing sludge

○Jin Yeon Lee¹, Seong Ho Son¹, Sung Cheol Park¹, Yong Hwan Kim¹, Chulwoong Han¹ (1. Korea Institute of Industrial Technology)

Keywords:Copper, Recovery, Electro-refining, Organic additive, High purity

Generally, many of the copper-containing sludge occur during the course of the electroplating process. The high purity copper is recovered from high concentration of copper sludge due to the leaching process by sulfuric acid, electro-winning and electro-refining process. However, copper-containing sludge of less than 20%, it is difficult to recover high purity copper.
In this study, in order to recover high purity copper from copper-containing sludge of less than 20% was fabricated by arc-reduction process and electro-refining process. To investigate the variation in the surface morphologies and purities of copper deposited on cathode during the experiment for 96 hours, electro-refining for copper was performed in sulfuric acid with organic additives. The surfaces of copper were analyzed with field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and AFM (Atomic Force Micrometer), the surface roughness was slightly decrease due to the composition of organic additives such as suppressors and accelerators. The impurities of crude metal in anode and electro-refined in cathode were analyzed by Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometer (ICP-OES, Integra XL, GBC Scientific). The purities of crude metal in anode by arc-reduction process were 86.50 wt.% and 94.97 wt.%, and several impurity metals of iron, nickel, cobalt, zinc, manganese and etc. After copper electro-refining process, the purity of copper increased up to 99.99 wt.%.