Thermal analysis of Indonesian copper sulphide
Abstract The development of extracting hydrometallurgical process for copper sulphide mineral becomes one of the promising fields, not only for the copper production but also for the production of metal by-products. The advantage of the thermal analysis is to get the phase form of the minerals on a certain temperature. With this result, the chosen metal can be selectively extracted. The goal of this study is to understand the thermal reaction of the copper sulphide as the basic data to develop a process flowsheet of extracting copper and other important metals from the copper concentrates by using an alternative new hydrometallurgy process to increase the value of the minerals. The thermal behaviour was investigated by simultaneous thermal analysis consisting of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) in combination with thermo gravimetry (TG) and fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. Samples were pre-treated by roasting at the several temperature transitions and subsequently characterized by XRD and scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS).