Recovery of copper powder from copper bleed electrolyte of an Indian copper smelter by electrolysis

Copper bleed solution generated from an Indian Copper smelter contains high amount of copper and nickel along with several impurities. Attempts have been made to develop a new process for the production of pure copper powder from such streams. The purity of the electrolytic copper powder produced from such bleed streams was found to be 99.93%. Properties such as compact density of the annealed copper powder, flow-ability, particle size, etc. were evaluated and were found to be suitable for the powder metallurgical applications.