Abstract
World alumina producers are focusing their efforts on increasing plant efficiency and product quality. The aluminum smelters, the customers of about 90% of the alumina plant product, are requiring a strong and coarse alumina. This demand has lead to more challenging process conditions for the hydrate precipitation process, requiring further fundamental understanding.
This paper describes a methodology to predict the Particle Size Distribution (PSD) of hydrate precipitation using SysCAD steady state process modeling. The process model is validated with data from ETI alumina plant. It is shown that Hatch and ETI Aluminyum have implemented a modified hydrate precipitation circuit that employ a classification system for proper distribution of coarse and fine seed, agglomeration stages, and new particle process control strategies which resulted in hydrate product coarsening from approximately 20%, -44µm to 10%-12%, -44 µm and product yield to over 94 gpl Al2O3.
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© 2016 The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society
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Stamatiou, E., Chinloy, D.R., Çelikel, B., Kayaci, M., Savkilioglu, E. (2016). Hatch - ETI Aluminyum Precipitation Modeling. In: Sadler, B.A. (eds) Light Metals 2013. The Minerals, Metals & Materials Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65136-1_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65136-1_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-65135-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-65136-1
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