Water in Sustainable Hydrometallurgy

随着全球对可持续发展需求的认识不断提高，在尊重环境和社会影响的情况下开发自然资源已成为世界各国决策者的核心议题。湿法冶金利用水基化学和工程技术，在广泛的温度和压力范围内采用各种化学条件，从天然矿产资源和采矿废物中回收金属。本研究方案是一项持续的努力，其重点是提高自然资源工业中水的回收、再循环和质量监测的效率。它继续在可持续湿法冶金实验测量支持的理论进步。提出的研究旨在通过正向渗透和冻融结晶来发现冶金厂再利用的过程水净化的新能源效率。通过使用可通过共晶冷冻结晶技术回收的可溶性无机电解质，可以进一步降低正向渗透的能源成本。我们还将研究多组分电解质系统中冰生长的基本原理，使用先进的技术来提高生产冰的质量。冻融结晶依赖于加拿大冬季自然发生的地表水的自然冻结。工程工艺可以将洁净水与受污染的工艺溶液、尾矿水和废水分离。潜在的假设是，就能源需求和产生的水的质量而言，这些过程可以比现有技术实现更好的水分离效率。另一个项目旨在利用先进的信号处理技术，进一步开发用于监测高温处理水中氧化还原水化学的坚固传感器。总的来说，拟议的研究计划旨在有效净用水的湿法冶金。该项目将培养3名博士、1名博士后和15名本科生/暑期学生，学习复杂实验条件下的水化学复杂技术和矿物工业过程传感器。这项工作通过研究矿产部门的新思路，为加拿大经济做出贡献，使金属生产商在全球市场上更具竞争力，以满足世界对以环保、可持续和健康的方式生产的金属的需求

With increasing global awareness for the needs of sustainable development, exploitation of natural resources respecting the environmental and societal impacts has become the centerpiece of policy makers around the world. Hydrometallurgy uses water-based chemistry and engineering for metal recovery from natural mineral resources and mining wastes by employing a variety of chemical conditions within a wide range of temperatures and pressures. The present research programme constitutes an on-going effort that focuses on improving the efficiency of water recovery, recycling and quality monitoring in the natural resource industry. It continues theoretical advances backed by experimental measurements in sustainable hydrometallurgy. The proposed research aims at discovering new energy efficiencies for process water purification for metallurgical plant reuse by forward osmosis and freeze-thaw crystallization. By using soluble inorganic electrolytes recoverable by eutectic freeze crystallization technology the energy cost of forward osmosis can be further minimised. We will also investigate the fundamentals of ice growth in multicomponent electrolyte systems using advanced techniques to improve the quality of produced ice. Freeze-thaw crystallization is relying on the natural freezing of the surface waters that occurs naturally in Canadian winters. An engineered process can separate clean water from contaminated process solutions, tailings waters and effluent streams. The underlying hypothesis is that these processes can achieve better water separation efficiency in terms of energy requirements and quality of water produced than current technology. An additional project aims at furthering the development of robust sensors for monitoring redox water chemistry in high temperature process waters using advanced signal processing techniques. Overall, the proposed research program aims at the hydrometallurgy of efficient net water usage. The program will train three doctoral, one post doctoral and fifteen undergraduate/summer students in sophisticated techniques on water chemistry and sensors on processes encountered in the minerals industry under complex experimental conditions. This work contributes to the Canadian economy by investigating novel ideas in the minerals sector that renders metal producers more competitive in the global markets to satisfy the world demand for metals produced in an environmentally respectful, sustainable and sound manner.**