Sulfuric Acid Leaching on Low Grade Oxide Ore

Abstract

In this paper, sulfuric acid leaching was carried out to assess the effect of several parameters on metal extraction in a low grade complex gossan ore in which the grade of zinc and iron is 13% and 40.2%, respectively. Parameters, such as sulfuric acid concentration, liquid to solid ratio and leaching temperature, were studied. The results show that the zinc leaching rate is almost 80%, while the iron leaching rate is about 45% used strong acid with 200g/L. It can be seen from the results that sulfuric acid leaching could not effectively recover zinc from gossan ores studied in this paper because of iron dissolving greatly.