Sina Ghasemi; Sima Mohammadnejad; Mohammad Reza Khalesi
Abstract
The adsorption of gold and copper cyanide complexes on the activated carbon is investigated using the Density Functional Theory (DFT). In order to represent the activated carbon, two fullerene-like model (presenting structural defect sites) and a simple graphene layer containing different functional ...
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The adsorption of gold and copper cyanide complexes on the activated carbon is investigated using the Density Functional Theory (DFT). In order to represent the activated carbon, two fullerene-like model (presenting structural defect sites) and a simple graphene layer containing different functional groups (presenting chemical active sites) are employed. The structural defect sites show a much lower adsorption tendency toward all the cyano complexes comparing to the chemical active sites. The interaction energy for all of the complexes with structural defect sites (concave) is very low. However, the graphene layer with unsaturated active sites displays the highest level of interaction almost for all the complexes except Cu(CN)4-3. The effect of oxygen functional groups on the graphite edges shows a crucial role in the selectivity of gold adsorption over copper complexes. It has increased adsorption energy for Cu(CN)2- in the presence of OH and COOH, and has decreased adsorption energy for Au(CN)2- by OH and increased by COOH. The study results elucidate the lower selectivity for adsorption of gold over copper cyanides by high oxygen content activated carbon. The energy levels of the HOMO and LUMO orbitals show adsorption of unpaired cyanide anions on the activated carbon surface occurs by electron transfer from the complex to the adsorbent and adsorption onto the activated carbon edges by transferring electrons from the absorbent to the complex. The result has clearly demonstrated that the functional groups increase the adsorption tendency for both the gold (only COOH) and copper complexes (OH and COOH) but deteriorate the selectivity of gold over copper cyanides.
Saeed Alishahi; Ahmad Darban; Mahmood Abdollahi
Abstract
Since a high toxicity of cyanide which use as a reagent in the gold processing plant, thiosulfate has been recognized as a environmental friendly reagent for leaching of gold from ore. After gold leaching process it's important for recovery of gold from solution using adsorption or extraction methods, ...
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Since a high toxicity of cyanide which use as a reagent in the gold processing plant, thiosulfate has been recognized as a environmental friendly reagent for leaching of gold from ore. After gold leaching process it's important for recovery of gold from solution using adsorption or extraction methods, One of these methods is activated carbon.The loading of gold from industrial thiosulfate solution that obtained from Zarshuran gold plant-Takab-Iran, onto activated carbon have been investigated. The affecting variables of the adsorption of gold on the carbon included, temperature, concentration of gold, size of activated carbon, pH and the ratio of amount of activated carbon to the volume of solution. The results have shown that at low concentration of gold, effective loading can be achieved at pH 10.5. The size of activated carbon has a significant effect on the loading of gold. In this research the recovery of gold on activated carbon has been predicted using artificial neural network. For this purpose temperature, pH, the proportion of solution volume to weight of activated carbon, gold concentration and time of adsorption were taken as input parameters, whereas, the recovery of gold on activated carbon from thiosulfate solution was considered as an output parameter. The network with LMBP algorithm with two hidden layer were used and the topology 5-4-13-1 showed the best ability for prediction.Moreover sensitive analyze were indicated parameters pH and temperature have substantial influence on adsorption.
