I am conducting research on the development of efficient metal recovery technology from unused metal resources. Metal resources are roughly divided into natural resources and urban resources. The composition of these resources is becoming more complex year by year, therefore difficult to process by conventional technologies. For example, ores that contain a large amount of impurities or lower grades of the target metal due to the deepening of the mining level are produced. In the copper ore that I mainly deal with in my research, in addition to harmful elements such as arsenic and antimony as impurities, zinc derived from sphalerite is regarded as a problem. In addition, electronic substrates are processed by the copper smelting process, but the substrate is containing impurities (bromine, aluminum, tin, etc.) that are not contained in copper ore. So, it is necessary to separate and remove them before putting them into the smelting process.
In order to separate these impurities from the target metal, I am researching resource processing technology by physical sorting and wet separation. The main elemental technologies are flotation, which selectively floats and recovers hydrophobic minerals (mainly useful metal-containing minerals) by blowing air into a slurry. And dissolve the target metal in the liquid using an acid or alkali leaching.
We are considering the development of new resource processing technology by combining surface analysis and information technology.