Copper smelting and converting: past and present Chilean developments

Since the second part of the twentieth century, Chile has become the largest copper producer in the world, being the pyrometallurgical processing of sulfides concentrates a central part of it.Since the introduction of the Peirce-Smith and later the Hoboken converters in Chilean smelters, some modifications were made to these reactors, including feeding of copper concentrate and intensive oxygen enrichment utilisation to increase their productivity. These modifications, and the use of bone dry concentrates, later became part of the new Teniente technology to smelt concentrates. All these innovations also influenced other processes, such as slag and gas treatment.This paper shows how pyrometallurgical processing of copper concentrates has been developed in Chile and how the Teniente reactor was conceived and implemented. Also, a comparison between nonferrous and ferrous technologies in terms of instrumentation and control, and some new processes being developed at laboratory and scale are shown.