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-----How much current to electro-recover copper?
I am trying to recover copper from a sulfuric acid solution containing 320 ppm/liter at pH of 3.5 . How do you figure amps for a quick single pass reactor?
greg bartock- columbia, Maryland
2000
You use Faraday's Law of Electrolysis, which states that one Faraday (96,485 amp-seconds) will recover one gram equivalent weight if the efficiency is 100 percent.
Your unit of measure 'ppm/liter' is a typo, you probably mean 'ppm or mg/liter'.
332 mg/liter already constitutes a quite dilute plating solution, and you obviously wish to plate out the copper to make it far more dilute. The real world problem is that at these low concentrations the efficiency is going to be well below 100 percent. With an extremely high surface area anode and very good agitation you might still get pretty good efficiency, but if you are trying to do it more casually, your efficiency may approach 0 percent.
That is why ion-exchange is often combined with electrolytic recovery. Ion exchange is good at removing very low concentrations from very high volumes of waste water. Then as the resin gets loaded you regenerate it and electro-recover from the regenerant which is hopefully many times more concentrated than the original waste stream.
Ted Mooney, P.E.
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finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
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2000
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