An attachment-detachment kinetic model for the effect of energy input on flotation

Abstract

This paper presents an attachment-detachment kinetic model for describing the effect of energy/power input on the flotation rate constant. The attachment-detachment kinetic model is developed and applied to the experimental data of Safari et al. (2016) to produce a data set of several thousand size-by-size attachment/detachment rate constants derived from 460 flotation tests. This data is used to derive empirical correlations for describing the relationship between the attachment/detachment rate constants and the particle size, particle density, bubble size, collector dosage and energy input. The attachment detachment model, used in conjunction with the empirical correlations for the rate constants, is able to predict the experimental data reasonably well in terms of both magnitude and trends. In addition, several exponents used in the empirical correlations for the rate constants are comparable to values found in the flotation literature.