Experimental Investigation of Copper Leaching from Flash Furnace Dust and Integrated Mathematical-Artificial Intelligence Modeling of Kinetics

hassan razzani; Hassan Hashemipour; Amirhossain Karimi

doi:10.51278/ajse.vi.1936

Authors

hassan razzani Department of Chemical Engineering, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran
Hassan Hashemipour Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran
Amirhossain Karimi Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Department of Chemical Engineering

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51278/ajse.vi.1936

Abstract

Hydrometallurgical methods, particularly leaching, provide an effective approach for recovering copper from low-grade materials. This study experimentally investigates the influence of temperature, time, and acid concentration on tank leaching of copper from flash furnace dust containing oxide and sulfide forms, focusing on recovery efficiency. Experimentally, increasing the temperature from 297 K to 317 K raised copper recovery from 53.8% to 69.3% (150 g/L H₂SO₄, 90 min), and the calibrated Shrinking Core Model (SCM) predicts that an increase of 30 K (from 300 K to 330 K, the upper value being a slight extrapolation) raises recovery at 100 g/L and 40 min by 19 percentage points (from 76% to 95%). Additionally, an artificial neural network (ANN) with a single hidden layer of 64 neurons achieved a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE, relative error) of approximately 2% (R² = 0.98) on an independent hold-out test set that was not used for training or architecture selection, demonstrating high predictive accuracy. By coupling the SCM with the ANN, used strictly for interpolation within the experimental window, the kinetic analysis was extended over the investigated range of operating conditions. The effective diffusion coefficient was correlated with temperature and acid concentration, yielding an apparent activation energy of 21.37 kJ/mol, which suggests that diffusion through the product layer is the dominant resistance in the leaching of flash furnace dust, although a contribution of the surface reaction (mixed control) cannot be excluded.

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