Water in Sustainable Hydrometallurgy

随着全球对可持续发展需要的认识日益增强，尊重环境和社会影响的自然资源开发已成为世界各地政策制定者的中心议题。湿法冶金通过在广泛的温度和压力范围内使用各种化学条件，使用水基化学和工程技术从自然矿产资源和采矿废物中回收金属。目前的研究方案是一项持续的努力，重点是提高自然资源行业的水回收、再循环和质量监测的效率。它继续以可持续湿法冶金的实验测量为后盾的理论进步。本研究旨在通过正向渗透和冻融结晶技术为冶金厂回用工艺水净化寻找新的能源效率。通过使用可通过共熔冷冻结晶技术回收的可溶性无机电解质，正向渗透的能源成本可进一步降至最低。我们还将使用先进的技术来研究多组分电解液系统中冰生长的基本原理，以提高生产的冰的质量。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。工程工艺可以将清洁水从受污染的工艺溶液、尾矿水和流出物中分离出来。基本的假设是，在能源需求和生产的水的质量方面，这些工艺可以实现比目前技术更好的水分离效率。另一个项目旨在进一步开发坚固耐用的传感器，利用先进的信号处理技术监测高温工艺水中的氧化还原水化学。总体而言，拟议的研究方案旨在有效利用净水的湿法冶金。该计划将培训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尖端技术和矿物工业中遇到的过程传感器。这项工作通过研究矿产部门的新想法，使金属生产商在全球市场上更具竞争力，以满足世界对以尊重环境、可持续和健康的方式生产的金属的需求，为加拿大经济做出贡献。

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.**