Tankhouse Material Handling at Heding Copper 620,000 tpa Copper Electrorefinery

Heding Copper (Zhejiang Jiangtong Fuye Heding Copper Co., Ltd.) operates modern copper electrorefinery in Fuyang province, China. The copper electrorefinery started operation in 2014, which was followed by two expansions in 2017 and 2022. Today the design capacity of the electrorefinery is 620.000 tpa. Starting point of the design has been that electrode harvesting must be completed in one working shift. This set high requirements for tankhouse material handling system in terms of performance and reliability. Inner lug anode design is applied to ensure safe and fast simultaneous lifting of electrodes. Tankhouse material handling is based modern high-capacity machines, which provides continuous throughput with minimum intervention by the operators. Highly integrated solution enables uninterrupted and balanced material flow in the tankhouse, where more than 10 machines operate simultaneously. Experiences from TACO (“envelope”) cathodes have shown that high stripping capacity reaching over 600 cathodes/h can be maintained. This paper describes the basic design, working methods and tankhouse material handling technology enabling high production efficiency, which have been demonstrated over 10 years in Heding Copper.