Nickel limonite leaching has been subjected to a number of studies, one of the method is by using dissolved gaseous SO2-air. The selectivity of nickel over iron extracted from leaching using dissolved gaseous SO2-air is advantageous, however the nickel that can be recovered is limited. This paper studies pre-treatments that is applied to the nickel ore prior leaching in order to increase the recovery of dissolved nickel from nickel limonite ore. There two pre-treatments that were carried out in this research, roasting and alkali-roasting using Na2CO3. The extraction was carried out for 180 min with pH 2, 3, 4, and 5 and temperature 30, 55, and 80 °C. It is found that the highest yield is achieved at pH 2 and 80 °C with nickel recovery of 61.39%. At pH 2, for alkali-roasting pre-treatment, the nickel yield raised from 28.17% to 100% and for roasting pre-treatment the nickel yield increased from 20.42% to 61.39%. However, at pH 2, the nickel to iron selectivity decreased from 96272 to 534 for roasting pre-treatment and from 1.8 to 1 for alkali-roasting pre-treatment.
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