A rheological investigation of the behaviour of two Southern African platinum ores

Abstract

With the installation of ultrafine grinding on many platinum operations in southern Africa, there were concerns as to whether this would cause rheologically complex behaviour during the subsequent flotation of the ore. Rheologically complex behaviour refers to the non-Newtonian behaviour experienced by some suspensions, associated with exponential increases in yield stress and viscosity with increasing solids content. This is attributed to particle size and solids concentration effects, surface chemistry, and mineralogy. In this study, the rheological behaviour of two different platinum ores; a western limb UG2 ore and a Great Dyke platinum ore were investigated and compared with that of single mineral studies of the major gangue minerals of platinum ores (chromite, orthopyroxene, plagioclase and talc). The results show that Great Dyke ore is considerably more rheologically complex than UG2 ore. Great Dyke flotation concentrate shows high yield stress and viscosity at low solids concentrations (>20vol.% solids). Should the ROM ore in a Great Dyke flotation operation suddenly show significant changes in ore mineralogy, the rheological properties of the slurry should be considered since they may be detrimental to the overall performance of the operation (e.g. loss of recovery through poor gas dispersion). In contrast, the rheological behaviour of UG2 flotation samples shows little cause for concern for the plant operator. Comparison of the pure mineral samples shows that the complex rheological behaviour of the Great Dyke ore may be attributed to the high degree of low temperature alteration and the formation of phyllosilicate minerals such as talc, more than particle size effects.