RECOVERY OF GERMANIUM FROM COPPER SLAG USING SILICOTHERMIC PROCESS

The depletion of primary raw materials and the demand in High Tech has played a big role in finding new ways of getting raw materials including recycling. Germanium being a semi-conductor currently in high demand is being sourced from secondary materials. The purpose of this project was to recover Germanium from copper slag in the presence of pure silicon using the carbothermic reduction process. The experiment was designed using Minitab software with Taguchi as the tool for statistical analysis and to design the experiment. The working temperature was kept constant at 1350 degrees Celsius and the mass of silicon, slag basicity and residence time in the furnace were investigated with the response being recovery of germanium to determine the optimum conditions under which there is a high recovery of Germanium as per the conducted experiments. The findings of this experiment are that the conditions that yield a high recovery of Germanium are 0,008 mass of pure silicon, 0,8 basicity and the optimum time was found to be 120 minutes. In this investigation targeted to meet the sustainable research and development goal of implementation of circular economy by virtue of recycling metallurgical waste that goal. Moreover, from the carbothermic reduction cobalt and copper were recovered consequently. The optimum conditions were tested using the main effects, interaction, and sensitivity to noise ratio plots all from Taguchi.