A STUDY OF SEGREGATION ROASTING OF COPPER CONCENTRATE USING STATISTICAL DESIGN OF EXPERIMENTS

Segregation roasting has been carried out on calcines produced from pr eroasted copper concentrate. Segregation roasting reactions are comple x in nature and the efficiency of this process depends upon process pa rameters, such as, time, temperature, sodium chloride and charcoal add ition. Effect of each of the parameters, and also their interactions h ave been studied by carrying out experiments according to the principl e of design of experiments. From the design of experiments, a regressi on equation was developed, which expressed extraction of copper (recov ery) as a function of different process parameters and their interacti ons in coded form. Simultaneous variation of influencing parameters ha s been tried by the method of steepest ascent for a better assessment of their relative effectiveness and improvement in recovery. This tech nique also reduces the number of experiments and minimizes the experim ental error.