JSC “Ekaterinburg Non-Ferrous Metals Processing Plant”, Ekaterinburg, Russia:

A. I. Khlebnikov, Chief Metallurgist, e-mail: a.khlebnikov@ezocm.ru

Modern highly competitive precious metals market environment and state standards for ecologically sound and safe technologies, applied to refining plants, set their own conditions, which are very important for the plants for development and introduction of innovations. The JSC “Ekaterinburg Non-Ferrous Metals Processing Plant” has more than 20 years of experience of silver and free-flowing impurity metals distillation from gold-silver alloys and Dore gold with silver content from 10% to 60%, via vacuum distillation. Empirical experience and collected data were used for development of modern vacuum facilities in cooperation with Italian company IKOI Srl Unipersonale. The produced equipment allows to process from several kilograms to several tens of kilograms of gold-silver alloys and Dore gold within one technological cycle. Complete technological cycle may take 40–90 minutes (depending on composition and mass of fed material), with its following repeat, thus the recovery constitutes more than 98%. If raw material quantity for the processing is sufficiently large, the working time can be set to 24 hours. Method of gold-silver alloys separation, described in this article, has apparent competitive advantages, which allow to reduce metal investments, OPEX, and to minimize the release of toxic emissions to working area and environment. This article can be useful for refining plants’ managers and technical specialists, involved in separation of precious metals and alloys.

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