Lead and antimony metals are important basic raw materials and strategic materials for the development of the national defense industry, biomedicine, battery research and development, semiconductor production and other fields. At present, the Pb-Sb alloy separation process in domestic and foreign smelters has complex operation, large pollution, high energy consumption, long production process and low recovery rate. The effective development and utilization of lead and antimony resources not only has practical significance, but also has important strategic significance for promoting national economic development and scientific progress. This work introduced the gas pressurization technology, and by virtue of its technical characteristics of enhanced filtration and separation, put forward a new method of efficient and environmentally friendly separation and extraction of Pb-Sb resources. In this work, the theoretical purity and recovery rate after separation were calculated according to the phase diagram of Pb-Sb alloy using the lever principle, and the effects of different filtration temperatures, filtration pressures, filtration times, screen and melt composition on the separation results were discussed, and the separation mechanism of pressurized filtration separation was clarified. The results of SEM-EDS, metallographic microscope and XRF showed that lead migrated to the lower crucible along the pressure direction, and almost all antimony remained in the upper crucible. With the decrease of filtration temperature, the size of precipitation crystal increased, the viscosity of molten liquid phase increased, and the resistance of filter cake to liquid phase increased. The best separation conditions were obtained through experiments, under the conditions of filtration temperature T=553 K, screen N=100, filtration pressure p=0.2 MPa, and four filtration times, the upper enriched Sb phase with a content of more than 90wt%, and the lower enriched Pb phase with a content of 85wt% were successfully obtained, which was close to the theoretical value calculated from the Pb-Sb phase diagram.
MEI Yang
,
GUO Lei
,
GUO Zhan-Cheng
. Separation of lead and antimony in lead-antimony alloy by gas pressure filtration[J]. The Chinese Journal of Process Engineering, 2023
, 23(2)
: 254
-262
.
DOI: 10.12034/j.issn.1009-606X.221441