Abstract:The optimized leaching techniques were studied by technical experiment and neural network optimization for improving indium leaching rate. Firstly, effect of single technical parameter on leaching rate was investigated experimentally with other parameters fixed as constants. The results show that increasing residual acidity can improve leaching rate of indium. Increasing the oxidant content can obviously increase leaching rate but the further addition of oxidant could not improve the leaching rate. The enhancement of temperature can improve the leaching rate while the further enhancement of temperature decreases it. Extension leaching time can improve the leaching rate. On this basis, a BPNN model was established to study the effects of multi-parameters on leaching rate. The results show that the relative error is extremely small, thus the BPNN model has a high prediction precision. At last, optimized technical parameters which can yield high leaching rate of 99.5% were obtained by experimental and BPNN studies: residual acidity 50-60 g/L, oxidant addition content 10%, leaching temperature 70 °C and leaching time 2 h.

Key words: indium; leaching rate; ITO waste target; BPNN model