The Ideal Copper Smelter

IT IS obviously impossible to design a copper smelting plant which could be considered, ideal under all conditions. For example, a plant properly designed to smelt the concentrates resulting from the treatment of porphyry ores by flotation would not be the kind of plant that one would design for the treatment of a coarse pyritous copper ore. The smelting of flotation or other fine concentrates is generally accomplished in a reverberatory plant, although occasionally the concentrates are sintered and then smelted in blast furnaces. On the other hand, coarse self-fluxing ores, whether pyritic or semi-pyritic, are generally smelted in a blast-furnace plant. Even this statement is only- approximately true, since the choice will be influenced by many factors; for example, the kind of fuel available (coal, oil or coke), the value of power (electric or steam), the uses to which waste steam may be put (heating, drying, etc.), the cost of refractories (silica and fire brick), the permanence and continuity of the ore supply and the relative first costs of the two types of plant (the reverberatory plant is generally more expensive to construct and to shut down), the contour of the site on which the plant is to be built (rugged, rolling or flat), the intelligence and character of the labor avail-able, and many other factors. From these remarks, it is evident that no copper smelter can be ideal for all conditions of ore and locality, and inasmuch as most of the copper now being pro-duced comes from fine or flotation concentrates and these are generally smelted in reverberatory furnaces, I shall confine my remarks to this type of smelt-ing plant.