Dissolution kinetics of calcined ulexite in ammonium carbonate solutions

The leaching kinetics of calcined ulexite in ammonium carbonate was studied in this work. The effect of parameters of ammonium carbonate concentration, solid/liquid ratio, stirring speed, calcination temperature and reaction temperature was determined in the experiments. It was found that the conversion rate increased with increasing ammonium carbonate concentration, reaction temperature and decreasing solid/liquid ratio. However, the effect of stirring speed on the conversion rate was insignificant. The experimental data practised the heterogeneous and homogeneous models, and an acceptable model for the conversion rates of ulexite was determined to be a first-order pseudo-homogeneous reaction model. The activation energy of dissolution process was determined to be 35.3 kJ/mol.