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Innovations in Tantalum Material Production Processes

Iterative upgrades in tantalum material production processes are fundamentally changing the industry landscape. Traditional tantalum ore extraction relies on multiple chemical precipitation steps, making it difficult to achieve purity exceeding 99.9% and generating large amounts of fluorine-containing wastewater. A newly built digital hydrometallurgical plant, using an ICP-MS online monitoring system, has achieved a purity of potassium fluorotantalate exceeding 99.995% and reduced impurity levels to below 5 ppm. The plant's continuous ion exchange technology has increased tantalum recovery rates from 82% with traditional processes to 95%, reducing hazardous waste disposal by 3,000 tons annually.

Breakthroughs have also been achieved in pyrometallurgy. The power of the vacuum electron beam melting furnace has been increased to 600kW, enabling the melting of 500kg tantalum ingots at a time, a threefold increase in efficiency compared to traditional equipment. Through a directional solidification process under inert gas protection, the grain uniformity of tantalum ingots has been improved by 40%, reducing the cracking rate during subsequent rolling from 15% to below 3%. These technological innovations not only enabled the realization of the annual production capacity target of 1,100 tons of potassium fluorotantalate and 860 tons of smelted niobium, but also reduced the energy consumption per unit product by 28%, clearing the cost barriers for the large-scale application of tantalum materials.