Investigation of the Precious Elements in the Angouran Lead and Zinc Complex

Metals such as cadmium, germanium, cobalt, and indium are important materials which are used in semiconductors, catalysts, batteries, glass, ceramic, abrasives, and magnets. The problem is that these metals do not generally form the primary product of mines (attractor metals or major industrial host metals), such as aluminum, copper, zinc, and lead but they are only available as byproducts or sometimes co-products of the mining and refining of primary ores. For this reason, they are called “hitchhiker” or “companion” metals. Due to the necessity of using these metals, it is beneficial to estimate the potential sources in the existing mines. In this paper, possible sources of hitchhiker metals in the Anguran lead and zinc ores were described. Research showed that extraction of elements such as cadmium, silver, arsenic, germanium, cobalt and indium were affordable. The average grade of these elements in similar mines were 1500, 78, 500, 12, 500 and 1 ppm respectively. The average grade of these elements varied in different zones of Anguran lead and zinc complex. Also in the most of the cases, they were bigger than the average grade of these elements in the similar active mines. So, more studies need to be done on the separation of these elements.