Sustainable Mining and Metallurgy

Manually horizontal casted silver anode plates and traditional ship-type silver electrolytic cells are adopted by a certain smelter to recover silver from lead anode slime by electrolysis, presenting multiple issues such as large footprint, large amounts of capital tied up, high production costs and poor operating environment, so it’s urgent to introduce new high efficiency silver electrolysis equipments. The principles, advantages and application of anode plates produced by manually vertical mould casting and automatically horizontal continuous casting, vertical high-efficiency electrolytic cells and no residuals anode electrolytic cells were introduced in this paper. The silver recovery process of automatically horizontal continuous casted anode plates together with vertical high-efficiency electrolytic cells and no residuals anode electrolytic cells, results in an anode scrap ratio of 5%~10%, down by 15% compared with traditional electrolysis equipment, an increase in current density by about 70A/m2 and a rise in current efficiency by around 35%, saving production costs. The produced silver powder is up to the national standards and the gold content in it drops from 16.5g/t to 0.5g/t, leading to remarkable economic benefits.