Sustainable Mining and Metallurgy

In view of the problems of difficult and incomplete separation of selenium and mercury in the treat ment of copper smelting acid mud, this paper innovatively used copper as a separating agent without introducing new impurities to effectively separate selenium and mercury in the acid mud. The specific process flow was acid mud chlorination leaching-copper precipitation separation mercury-sulfur dioxide reduction precipitation selenium-sulfurization precipitation copper. The test was carried out on the factors of separating selenium and mercury. The results showed that under the premise of reaction temperature of 20℃ and selenium concentration in the solution not higher than 20g/L, the sodium metabisulfite was used to adjust the potential of the solution to about 700mV, and then the separation agent copper was added to separate selenium and mercury. When the end point potential was about 450mV, the reaction ended. At this time, the reduction rate of mercury was greater than 98%, and the mercury content in the solution after reduction was less than 200mg/L. The grade of mercury slag obtained was about 80% and the selenium content was less than 1%, which achieved the purpose of effective separation of selenium and mercury.