Research Progress on the Extractive Metallurgy

Dear Colleagues,

In metals technology, the extractive metallurgy, as a metallurgical stage, ensures the required chemical conditions for advanced products. During extractive metallurgy, high- and low-temperature units are used for smelting, leaching, electrowinning, treating and casting of metals. Extractive metallurgy is characterised by thermodynamic and kinetic relationships between all components. Therefore, investigations on interactions of hetero-phases system are essential and fundamental. Heterogeneous systems cover solid, liquid and gaseous components such as metal alloys, slags, bubbles, refractories, nonmetallic inclusions and electrodes. The flow of liquid metal or solvent in the metallurgical units create a varied hydrodynamic structure and a varied mass transport rate between liquid–solid–gas phases. Moreover, concentrations of local elements create no equilibrium of thermodynamic states. Hence, knowledge on phenomena occurring during extractive metallurgy is fundamental for a deeper insight to the nature of metals technology. In general, research activities in this field can be divided into three categories: laboratory tests on water models or high-temperature low-scale stands, industrial trials, and numerical simulations using advanced mathematical models. The determined development of the advanced metal technology contributes to the optimization of the existing process engineering to search for new solutions in the area of the metals industry.

Dr. Adam Cwudziński
Prof. Dr. Lifeng Zhang
Guest Editors

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