Process mineralogy as a key factor affecting the flotation kinetics of copper sulfide minerals

Abstract

The aim of this study is to apply process mineralogy as a practical tool for further understanding and predicting the flotation kinetics of the copper sulfide minerals. The minerals' composition and association, grain distribution, and liberation within the ore samples were analyzed in the feed, concentrate, and the tailings of the flotation processes with two pulp densities of 25wt% and 30wt%. The major copper-bearing minerals identified by microscopic analysis of the concentrate samples included chalcopyrite (56.2wt%), chalcocite (29.1wt%), covellite (6.4wt%), and bornite (4.7wt%). Pyrite was the main sulfide gangue mineral (3.6wt%) in the concentrates. A 95% degree of liberation with d 80 > 80 µm was obtained for chalcopyrite as the main copper mineral in the ore sample. The recovery rate and the grade in the concentrates were enhanced with increasing chalcopyrite particle size. Chalcopyrite particles with a d 80 of approximately 100 µm were recovered at the early stages of the flotation process. The kinetic studies showed that the kinetic second-order rectangular distribution model perfectly fit the flotation test data. Characterization of the kinetic parameters indicated that the optimum granulation distribution range for achieving a maximum flotation rate for chalcopyrite particles was between the sizes 50 and 55 µm.

Textural Quantification and Classification of Drill Cores for Geometallurgy: Moving Toward 3D with X-ray Microcomputed Tomography (µCT)

“…While such texture primitives are usually powerful for texture classification (shown by the higher classification accuracy in Tables 11 and 12), it lacks physical meaning with regard to the intrinsic ore properties, which in turn limits its application in predictive process models. On the other hand, mineral association has been demonstrated to be directly correlated with breakage mechanism (Parian et al 2018) and flotation (Jordens et al 2016;Bahrami et al 2019), which opens up the potential of building such predictive process models using AIM.…”

Study of process water effect on the activation of sphalerite during differential flotation of Pb-Cu-Zn

“…Mineralogy does not clearly show the presence of oxidized copper and lead, which could be soluble in water, and justify the presence of Cu 2+ and Pb 2+ ions. However, the hypothesis points out that only a small region of the surface oxidizes (Liu et al, 2013;Bahrami et al, 2019), and dissolve cannot be ruled out. This can also be caused by some reagents, such as sodium cyanide, which tends to dissolve the surface of copper particles and form soluble copper cyanide complexes as explained by Rao et al (Rao et al, 2011) in Reactions ( 1) and ( 2):…”

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“…The highest Fe content in the feed, concentrate, and tailings was related to the +45-75 μm size fraction and follows a downward trend in the coarse and fine sizes. Since chalcopyrite and pyrite minerals with chemical formulas of CuFeS 2 and FeS 2 respectively, contain Fe, and the iron content in the samples can be related to mainly the presence of these minerals (Bahrami et al, 2019b). According to mineralogical studies, pyrite is the main metallic mineral in the +45-75 μm fraction with the amount of 6.5-8.5% by volume and chalcopyrite, with the amount of 0.9-1.5% by volume, comes next.…”