Precious Metals Operations
The main processing steps of the Precious Metals Operations are the smelter, the Cu-leaching & electro winning plant and the precious metals refinery. The operations are designed in such a way that raw materials, can enter the flow-sheet at the most optimal process step, determined by their physical aspect, their analytical fingerprint and their (precious metals) value.
The smelter furnace (first step in the Precious Metals Operations) uses the Isa smelt, submerged lance combustion technology. This involves injecting oxygen enriched air and fuel in a molten bath. Umicore is the only company to apply this technology on such a large scale with such a variety of materials. The smelter separates precious metals in a copper bullion, from mostly all other metals, concentrated in a lead slag, further treated at the Base Metals Operations.
After leaching out the copper in the leaching and Cu- electro winning plant, the precious metals are collected in a residue that is further refined at the precious metals refinery.
Our precious metals refinery combines classical methods (cupellation) with unique in-house developed processes (silver refinery), to enable Hoboken treating all possible variations and ratio's of precious metals (silver and gold) and platinum group metals (platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium and ruthenium).
