Deportment of Minor Elements in Industrial Copper Smelting

Abstract A sampling campaign was conducted in an industrial copper smelter to examine the development of the slag and matte assays and deportments of the minor as well as trace elements in a processing chain, where a continuously operating matte smelting step is linked with the batchwise operating-converting and fire-refining steps. The sampling practices, where fast cooling was impossible for retaining the phase assemblages present at high temperature, were offset by advanced analytical methods and techniques of electron probe x-ray microanalysis and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry, allowing the phase analyses to be carried out directly from polished sections with detection limits down to the parts-per-billion level. The campaign aimed to evaluate the behavior of several minor elements in an environment optimized for copper production.