Recovery of nickel powder from copper bleed electrolyte of an Indian copper smelter by electrolysis

When nickel concentration increases in the copper sulphate electrolyte during electrolysis, it starts electrodepositing on the copper cathode thereby affecting the purity of the copper. In order to produce high quality copper cathodes with less than 1 ppm Ni, it became necessary to bleed-off large volumes of foul electrolyte contaminated with nickel and other impurities. The study reported in this paper was part of the effort aimed at devising a cost effective and an ecofriendly method for the production of value added powders from a waste stream, for P/M application. A part of copper salts and regenerated acid was used back into the system. As discussed in our paper on copper recovery from copper bleed stream (CBS), a process involving decopperisation and crystallisation–solvent extraction (SX) separation–electrowinning (EW) has been attempted as an alternative to the conventional process. Optimum conditions for nickel recovery from this type of solution have been investigated through a series of experiments carried out in a rectangular electrolytic bath with SS as cathode and Pb–Sb as anode. A quantitative and selective recovery was found for nickel deposition under suitable conditions. The purity of the electrolytic nickel powders so produced was found to be 99.89%. The compact density of the annealed nickel powder was 7.72 g/cc. Other properties of the nickel powders such as flow-ability, particle size, etc. were also evaluated to assess its suitability for its use in P/M applications.