US 6,117,209 AGranted

Hydrometallurgical process for treating alloys and drosses to recover the metal components

AssigneeGNB Technologies, Inc.

InventorProsper K. Adanuvor

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Abstract

A hydrometallurgical method involves treating a dross source containing typically both antimony and tin and treating the dross to a series of chemical operations to yield a soft lead precursor, suitable for making soft lead for lead-based alloys for batteries or other applications, which method includes utilizing sulfuric acid to decompose the dross source to provide a slurry in which the liquid contains the principal tin values and the solid phase contains the antimony and lead values, followed by treating of the separated solid phase so as to either separate the lead values from the antimony values via an antimony leach and a solid/liquid separation or by desulfurizing the solid phase, carrying out a solid/liquid separation, treating the solid phase with a lead leach to solubilize the lead values and carrying out a further solid/liquid separation to recover the lead-rich phase as the filtrate, separated from the antimony-rich solid phase.

Claims10

Dependent claims

A method for recovering soft lead precursor from a dross source containing undue levels of at least one of antimony and tin and wherein the desired soft lead precursor requires separating at least one of the antimony and tin components, the method comprising:

(a) providing a lead-containing dross source having at least antimony and tin at an amount requiring separation,
(b) mixing the dross source with sulfuric acid to decompose the dross source to provide a slurry in which the liquid phase contains the tin values and the solid phase contains the antimony and lead values and a sulfur component,
(c) subjecting said slurry to a first solid/liquid separation and recovering a solid phase therefrom,
(d) treating the solid phase recovered from the first solid/liquid separation by the treatment selected from the group consisting of:
(i) solubilizing a sulfur component of the solid phase, and
(ii) solubilizing by an antimony leach to provide an antimony-rich liquid while obtaining a lead-rich solid phase, and then
(e) recovering a soft lead precursor.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.