CARACTERIZACIóN DE CONCENTRADOS DE COBRE PRODUCIDOS EN ARGENTINA PARA ANALIZAR LA FACTIBILIDAD DE LA INSTALACIóN DE UNA PLANTA PIROMETALúRGICA

the copper demand in the world has considerably increased during the last years due to the emergent markets, particularly the chinese market. nowadays, the mining projects for copper exploitation that are being developed in the north of argentina conclude with the concentrates exports. in our country different explorations have been carried out and in some cases high law of copper minerals are being exploited (0,5% - 0,8%). these minerals are free from impurities such as: sb,as,pb,bi and hg. this would lead to think that there are good prospects for the copper pyrometallurgy that have not been developed yet in our country. the conditions for the argentinean copper market present and unfulfilled demand for this metal, since there are industrial plants which convert metallic copper into final products leading to a new copper intermediate product import. this paper proposes to deepen the knowledge and to broaden the range of technical principles with can avoid exporting concentrates and instead it can provided raw material to a national metallurgical industry in order to produce metallic copper so that the domestic market will be supplied, thus importing raw material will no longer be necessary.