Environmental remediation of sulfidic tailings with froth flotation: Reducing the consumption of additional resources by optimization of conditioning parameters and water recycling

Abstract

The removal of sulfidic species in tailings using froth flotation is a promising approach to prevent phenomena such as acid mine drainage. However, flotation requires the consumption of reagents and water that represent additional expenses. Despite the strong interest of scientists and industry alike on tailings remediation, there is no study on the minimization of resource consumption to promote the implementation of desulfurization with froth flotation. Following a systematic analysis based on Design of Experiments (DoE), this work aims to determine the implications of a decrease in the consumption of flotation reagents and fresh water. It was found that: i) recovery of sulfidic species is strongly influenced by collector concentration and the use of a preliminary re-dispersion step; ii) higher frother concentrations have a negative impact on sulfur grade in the concentrate; and iii) the interactions between the conditioning variables hereby explored have no significant impact on flotation performance. Composition analysis showed that flotation further aids in the removal of hazardous species, such as As, Co and Zn. Finally, the use of recycled water appears possible since flotation performance remained unchanged over 10 flotation cycles, despite the observed accumulation of metallic ions and organic species in the process water.

A Study on the Electric Surface Potential and Hydrophobicity of Quartz Particles in the Presence of Hexyl Amine Cellulose Nanocrystals and Their Correlation to Flotation

“…Nowadays, this traditional approach is challenged by the demand to process ores with decreasing grades (Calvo et al, 2016) and thus, many efforts have been recently undertaken to better understand the various aspects of flotation processes with the aim of enhancing their efficiency. Simultaneously, the growing concerns in terms of environmental impact and consumption of natural resources urge for the design of mineral flotation processes with minimal impact, including for example, efficient water recycling strategies and the employment of more environmentally-friendly chemicals (Bridge, 2004;Pearse, 2005;Liu et al, 2013;Nuorivaara et al, 2019).…”

Innovative Methodology for Sulfur Release from Copper Tailings by the Oxidation Roasting Process

“…Generally, two methods to release sulfur from tailings rich in pyrite or pyrrhotite were involved, including flotation separation [8][9][10] and roasting [11]. e tailings rich in pyrrhotite had succeeded in desulfurization to less than 0.4 wt.% by optimizing the flotation process with respect to solution pH, activator, collector, frothier, and air-solid ratio [12].…”

Toward the Implementation of Circular Economy Strategies: An Overview of the Current Situation in Mineral Processing

“…The mineral concentrating operations generate a large amount of tailings and consume large amounts of energy and water (Donoso et al 2013, Curry et al 2014. In addition, concentration technologies can be used to reprocess tailings to obtain valuable components such as titanium or copper (Ghasemi et al 2019, 6 Mackay et al 2020, Zhang et al 2020 or remove unwanted components such as sulfidic species to prevent acid mine drainage (Nuorivaara et al 2019).…”