Treatment of Complex lead, Copper and Zinc sulfides

FOR the adoption of conventional methods for the recovery of lead , copper and zinc from the complex sulfide ores, it is essential that these be beneticiated to a high grade concentrate. The minerals present in such complex ores are often found in such close inter -growth that it is either difficult to obtain a suitable grade of the concentrate by physical methods or the recovery of metals in the respe-ctive concentrates is poor. For example, the zinc that finds its way to a copper concentrate is always discarded in the slag as a waste, while copper in a lead concentrate leads to serious smelting problems. In such cases the cost of production by conventional smelting process becomes
unfavourable and new approaches to process the ores
become more attractive.