Structure and property analysis of Pb-In-Zn during indium enrichment

Abstract

To solve the problem of low recovery and heavy losses of indium in water-quenched slag and copper-containing pig iron in the process of reduction smelting, a new idea of adding lead into the zinc-indium system to recover indium from zinc is proposed in this paper. First, the feasibility of the mixed smelting of zinc-indium-lead is studied theoretically by means of ab initio molecular dynamics simulation and the optimal mixing ratio is obtained. Then, the theoretical calculation results are verified experimentally. The calculated results show that the interaction between Pb-In is stronger than that between Zn-In and surrounding atoms. After kinetic simulation, In and Pb aggregate together, and the effect is the most obvious when the molar ratio between lead and indium is 3:1. The miscibility experiment of the lead-indium-zinc alloy proves the correctness of the simulation results. The results of industrial experiments further verify that the recovery rate of indium is the best when molar ratio of Pb to In is 3:1. This study provides a feasible method for the recovery of indium and a new idea for the recovery and utilization of nonferrous metals.

Keywords

indium enrichment / density functional theory / lead addition / ab initio molecular dynamics

References

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