Sulfuric acid leaching and recovery of vanadium from a spinel concentrate beneficiated from stone coal ore

In order to recover vanadium from vanadium-bearing black shale efficiently, a hydrometallurgical process is developed in this paper to treat the concentrate beneficiated from stone coal ore, in which the vanadium mainly occurs in the form of Fe 3- x V x O 4 spinel. At the first step, the leaching behaviors of Fe and V from the concentrate by using sulfuric acid solution are investigated in detail. The extraction rates of vanadium and iron could reach 92.5% and 98.5% respectively under the optimum leaching conditions of leaching temperature of 90 °C, sulfuric acid concentration of 25 wt%, leaching time of 90 min, L/S mass ratio of 30 and stirring speed of 600 rpm. Secondly, the iron impurity in the pregnant solution is removed efficiently by the precipitation method with Fe 2 O 3 as nucleating agent. The effect of pH value, the amount of Fe 2 O 3 nucleating agent and the precipitating time on the removal of iron and losing of vanadium are systematically investigated, and thereby >99.7% iron impurity can be removed with the loss rate of vanadium not higher than 2.5%. Finally, vanadium is precipitated from the purified leach solution as ammonium poly-vanadate by adding ammonium sulfate , and then the product of V 2 O 5 is obtained by calcining the ammonium poly-vanadate. The purity of V 2 O 5 powder can reach 92.0% approximately.