The challenge
A first of its kind, industrial size, production plant utilising furnaces instead of a leaching process.
The project gained environmental approval with a list of stringent conditions from Oman’s Ministry of Environmental and Climate Affairs. The engineering and design had to conform to these conditions, as well as EU and World Bank Environmental Regulations.
The solution
Howden designed and implemented two systems to achieve the environmental requirements: dry-gas and off-gas train. The dry-gas train consisted of two separate, identical systems for 100% redundancy comprising a primary cyclone, primary forced draft cooler (FDC), secondary cyclone, secondary FDC, carbon feeder, and bag filter, and three Induced Draught (ID) fans to a common stack. The off-gas trains consisted of three separate purification systems with the whole system including duct routing, duct sizing as well as the stack designed by Howden.
The outcome
Due to the design of the system, as well as the redundancy of critical pieces of equipment, the plant has managed to achieve and exceed its requirements for high purity antimony on an industrial level, and has allowed the customer to become a world leader in this field.
The project has led to ground breaking techniques, as well as improvements being implemented to streamline the process of antimony extraction. Howden is continuously involved in this project’s ongoing expansion and improvement.
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