A honeycomb-tube packing medium and its application to column flotation

Abstract

We address problems in the development of large-scale flotation columns that use short cylinders. As a starting point, we investigated the packing medium to identify a highly efficient internal packing for the flotation column. The chosen packing was a honeycomb structure with an aperture diameter of 80 mm, a web thickness of 0.80 mm, a film height of 1000 mm, packed into a 400 mm diameter space, which completely filled the vessel at optimal cost. The column consisted of a modular ring of single-hole hexagonal honeycomb tube packing made from atactic polyproplene (PP-R). The packing was tested in a cyclonic, static micro-bubble flotation column. Computational fluid dynamic modeling was used to analyze the flotation fluid in a honeycomb tube packed flotation column. Our results show that the fluid axial movement was maximized and that the transverse fluid velocities were zero in the vicinity of axial flow. Using the honeycomb tube packing for copper sulfide flotation we observed that the average concentration in the product was increased to 25.41%, from an average feed concentration of 0.729%, with an average recovery of 92.92%. The demands of on-site industrial production were met.