Copper Crusher – Copper Ore Crusher – SME Crushing Plant

Copper ore is kind of very important metal materials to the national economic construction. Copper mine is of many excellent performances, such as conductivity, thermal conductivity, wear resistance, easy casting, mechanical properties and easy made of alloy properties. Therefore copper mine is widely used in electrical industry, machinery manufacturing, transportation, construction, electronic information, energy, military and other industrial fields. Usually it’s in the form of copper metal and copper alloys. It is generally believed that the number of copper mine consumption and uses often reflects the level of a country's industrialization. Especially with the new wave of industrial revolution and advent of high technology development, human demand for copper ore will gradually increase.

Copper Crusher

The use of copper

Most copper is used for electrical equipment (60%); construction, such as roofing and plumbing (20%); industrial machineri, such as heat exchangers (15%) and alloys (5%). The main long established copper alloys are bronze, brass (a copper-zinc alloy), copper-tin-zinc, which was strong enough to make guns and cannons, and was known as gun metal, copper and nichel, known as cupronickel, which was the preferred metal for low-denomination coins. Copper is ideal for electrical wiring because it is easily worked, can be drawn into fine wire and has a high electrical conductivity.

Indonesia is of rich copper mine and so the copper mining crushing plant is widely applied in Indonesia mining. Compared with Indonesia copper mining, there are several countries which are also rich of copper mine, such as Chile, the United States, Poland, Zambia, Russia, Zaire, Peru, Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan, the Philippines and China, etc. In particular, Chile and the United States are the copper mine power. In recent years, with the number of cooper mine new discovery or expansion of existing copper mine reserves, Indonesia Copper Ore resources are growly rapidly.

Copper mining process

There are two distinct types of copper ore, the sulfide ore and the oxide ore. The sulfide ores are beneficiated in flotation cells, while the oxide ores are generally leached.

First the copper ore from a open pit mine is blasted, loaded and transported to the primary crushers. Then the ore is crushed and screened, with the fine sulfide ore (<0.5 mm) going to froth flotation cells for recovery of copper. The coarser ore goes to the heap leach, where the copper is subjected to a dilute sulfuric acid solution to dissolve the copper. Then the leach solution containing the dissolved copper is subjected to a process called solvent extraction (SX). The SX process concentrates and purifies the copper leach solution, so the copper can be recovered at a high electrical current efficiency by the electrowinning cells. It does this by adding a chemical reagent to the SX tanks which selectively binds with and extracts the copper, is easily separated from the copper (stripped), recovering as much of the reagent as possible for re-use. The concentrated copper solution is dissolved in sulfuric acid and sent to the electrolytic cells for recovery as copper plates (cathodes). From the copper cathodes, it is manufactured into wire, appliances, etc. that are used in every day life. Below are some photos of the process equipment at an Arizona Copper Mine.

Copper crushing

When the copper ore come out from the ground, It is loaded into a 300 ton truck for transport to the crusher. The complete copper crushing plant includes jaw crusher as primary crusher, impact crusher and cone crusher. After crushed, the copper ore must be screened out according to size by screening machine and distribute the classified ore to a series of conveyors, for transportation to the mill for further processing.

In the copper ore grinding process, rod mill, ball mill and regrind ball mill are used. Ball mill is the most common copper ore grinding mill in copper ore concentrator.

SME can supplies a complete crushing plant for copper mining in Chile, Peru, USA, Congo, Zambia, KZ, Mexico, Belgium, Germany, Zaire, and can also design the special crushing plant according to your requirements.

SME is a professional copper mining equipment manufacturer and exporter. More than 20 years, we have established lots of copper mining crushing plant in Indonesia. The copper mining equipment are mainly divided into two kinds that are copper crusher and copper grinding equipment. To provide more advanced copper mining equipment, there is mobile copper crusher plant invented by our engineers. Mobile copper crushing plant has been widely applied for Indonesia Copper Mining.