Process Mineralogy of the Tailings from Llallagua: Towards a Sustainable Activity

Abstract

There are significant tin reserves in the dumps and tailings from Llallagua. Currently, this waste is being processed using gravity concentration or a combination of gravity concentration with a final stage of froth flotation. A process mineralogy study of the tailings and their products after processing in Llallagua was carried out to determine the failings of the processing system in order to contribute to designing an improved new processing scheme. The mineralogy of the feed tailings, concentrate, and final tailings was determined by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and mineral liberation analysis. The tailings were composed of quartz, tourmaline, illite, K-feldspar, plagioclase, cassiterite, rutile, zircon, and monazite. The concentrate essentially contains cassiterite (57.4 wt.%), tourmaline, quartz, hematite, rutile and rare earth minerals, mainly monazite and minor amounts of xenotime and florencite. The concentrate contained 52–60 wt.% of SnO2 and 0.9–1.3 wt.% REE. The final tailings contained 0.23–0.37 wt.% SnO2 and 0.02 wt.% of Rare Earth Elements (REE). Only 57.6 wt.% of cassiterite from the concentrate was liberated. The non-liberated cassiterite was mainly associated with quartz, tourmaline, and rutile. The average grain size of monazite was 45 µm and 57.5 wt.% of this was liberated. In other cases, it occurs in mixed particles associated with tourmaline, quartz, cassiterite, and muscovite. To improve the sustainability of this mining activity, the concentrate grade and the metal recovery must be improved. Reducing the particle size reduction of the processed tailings would increase the beneficiation process rates. In addition, the recovery of the REE present in the concentrate as a by-product should be investigated.

Cu and Au Mineralization of the Tolparovo Ore Occurrence: Evidence for the Formation of Redbed Copper Occurrences in Neoproterozoic Deposits of the Southern Urals

“…Hessite is generally one of the first formed telluride minerals. For the Fancha gold deposit (Xiaoqinling mining district, Lingbao City, Sanmenxia, Henan, China) and San Luis Alta Au-Ag-Te-(Bi-Se) deposit (Rio Grande district, Condesuyos Province, Arequipa, Peru), this is due to the fact that this mineral requires a relatively low fugacity of Te for its formation [82,83].…”

“…Silver tellurides are characteristic of many epithermal gold-telluride deposits [81,[96][97][98] and are often found in deposits of other types (volcanic-hosted massive sulfide (VHMS), intrusion-related gold deposits (IRGD), etc.) e.g., [67,[82][83][84]99,100]. In metamorphogenic-hydrothermal and skarn deposits, gold and silver tellurides, in association with bismuth minerals (wittichenite and Bi-tellurides), are often noted as inclusions in hypogenic bornite [101].…”

Evaluation of the potential of recovering various valuable elements from a vanadiferous titanomagnetite tailing based on chemical and process mineralogical characterization

“…Which not only improves the utilization of ores and tailings, but also avoids a lot of unnecessary resources and energy wastage by using process mineralogy to evaluate the potential of comprehensive tailings utilization (Barik et al, 2022;Simonsen et al, 2020). However, little literature reports on the process mineralogy of VTMT have been published, which is perhaps an important reason for the failure to fully utilization of the VTMT (Abdollahi et al, 2020;Alfonso et al, 2022;Ospina-Correa et al, 2018).…”