What is PGM refining?
Chemical Separation It involves dissolution and a series of solvent extractions, evaporation, precipitation and filtration steps to produce highly pure salts for each pgm. These salts then undergo heat treatment to convert them to the final pure precious metal.
What are the 3 stages of crude oil refinement?
Three major types of operation are performed to refine the oil into finished products: separation, conversion and treating.
How is platinum used in oil refining?
Reforming processes using platinum catalysts have become of major importance in petroleum refining during the past seven years. They enable the octane rating of naphthas to be greatly increased, and are more economical than any other refining process for the production of high octane gasoline.
Where are PGM found?
Most of the world’s PGMs are currently produced from the Bushveld Complex. The other leading type of deposit is in massive and disseminated nickel-copper ores, such as those of the Norilsk-Talnakh deposits of Russia and the Sudbury Basin deposits in Canada.
What are the steps of metallurgy?
Metallurgy consists of three general steps: (1) mining the ore, (2) separating and concentrating the metal or the metal-containing compound, and (3) reducing the ore to the metal. Additional processes are sometimes required to improve the mechanical properties of the metal or increase its purity.
How does the oil refining process work?
Refining turns crude oil into usable products. The crude petroleum is heated and the hot gases are passed into the bottom of a distillation column. As the gases move up the height of the column, the gases cool below their boiling point and condense into a liquid.
What processes are done to get useful products from crude oil or petroleum?
Petroleum refineries change crude oil into petroleum products for use as fuels for transportation, heating, paving roads, and generating electricity and as feedstocks for making chemicals. Refining breaks crude oil down into its various components, which are then selectively reconfigured into new products.
What is the role of catalyst in a refinery?
Petroleum refining catalysts play a key role as most of the processes beyond the crude unit are catalytic. The catalyst provides a surface for reactants to adsorb onto and from which products to desorb from. The role of the catalyst is to lower the activation energy of a reaction by providing a reaction pathway.