On March 18, the energy-saving and emission-reduction technological upgrading project of Chifeng Fubang Copper Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of CNMC, held a grand opening ceremony in Linxi Prefecture, Chifeng.

It is a technical renovation project for the old factory, making it necessary to make full use of the existing facilities and land.

A new smelting plant will be set up for the smelting system, including a 25-square-meter oxygen-rich side-blown smelting furnace and a 40-square-meter multi-lance top-blown converting furnace. In addition, the user will expand the concentrate storehouse, add a new slag cooling area and an oxygen generation system to increase the crude copper production capacity from 55,000 tons to 100,000 tons and 419,000 tons of sulfuric acid (100%) per year on the basis of the existing equipment and process.

the opening ceremony

The main smelting process adopted by the client is oxygen-rich side-blowing smelting + converter blowing + crude copper ingoting.

PKU Pioneer will build a set of VPSA oxygen equipment (14000Nm3/h or about 480TPD, 80%) to inject the oxygen gas into the side-blowing furnace for oxygen-rich smelting, which will be the 2nd oxygen unit built by PKU Pioneer for Fubang Copper Company.

As early as 2008, the two sides reached the first cooperation on the oxygen production project for oxygen-rich smelting. Its oxygen capacity reached 10,000Nm3/h, making it PKU Pioneer’s 1st VPSA oxygen production plant reaching 10,000Nm3/h for the non-ferrous industry.

After the renovation project is put into operation, the total oxygen flow of the two-phase oxygen-generating plants will amount to 24000Nm3/h.

Technical engineers of PKU Pioneer deeply learned during the project research period that, compared with the conventional oxygen plant projects for copper smelting, the difficulty of this one lies in the need to parallel the 2 oxygen generation units together to realize joint operation. Moreover, the control system needs to be flexibly adjusted according to the oxygen demands of the downstream smelting section to ensure the oxygen generation system operates stably for a long time under the most favorable working conditions.

Therefore, combined with the rich engineering experience in the non-ferrous industry, during the design process, PKU Pioneer’s project team conducted specialized studies on difficult issues and continuously optimized the proposal to make sure that the overall design will fully meet the user's actual manufacturing needs under the premise of maintaining the advanced level of technical specifications.

In recent years, Fubang Copper Company has been steadily pursuing the path of green and environmental-friendly development of a circular economy by improving copper smelting as the main task, developing resources as the principal direction and chemical industry as the auxiliary, and the comprehensive utilization as the key enabler.

The energy-saving and emission reduction technological upgrade project is an environmental protection transformation project supervised by the Central Environmental Protection Inspection Group. Once completed, it will play a key role in improving copper production capabilities and bring beneficial economic and social benefits.