Abstract
The recovery of gold by ore leaching is influenced by the size of the particles and the chemical environment. The effect of particle size on the dissolution of gold is usually studied using mono-size particles as the gold in solution comes from the ore of a unique leached particle size. This paper proposes a method to estimate the gold dissolution as a function of particle size using a bulk ore sample, i.e., with the dissolved gold coming from the various sizes of particles carried by the ore. The results are consistent with the fact that gold dissolution increases with the decreasing particle size but results also indicate that gold dissolution of the ore within a size interval is not significantly affected by the grinding time used for the ore size reduction. Results also show a good dissolution of the gold contained in the fine-size fractions without oxidation and lead nitrate pre-treatment for an ore that is known to require such pre-treatment.
Highlights
More than 75% of the gold produced in the world is extracted by the cyanide leaching of gold ores.The ore is ground to expose the surface of the gold and the ground material is reacted with cyanide in oxygen-enriched slurry
The objective of the test work is to assess if gold dissolution as a function of particle size can be assessed from a natural ground ore rather than by using single-size ore particles [2,5]
Such a behaviour can only be observed by collecting redundant data which allows us to highlight the importance of the measurement errors for the processing of gold ore samples
Summary
More than 75% of the gold produced in the world is extracted by the cyanide leaching of gold ores. The ore is ground to expose the surface of the gold and the ground material is reacted with cyanide in oxygen-enriched slurry. Under these conditions gold is dissolved and recovered from the pregnant solution by adsorption on carbon or cementation on zinc powder [1]. The first objective of the paper is to evaluate the dissolution of gold from various particle size intervals using bulk ground ore samples rather than mono-size particles. The second objective of the paper is to determine whether the gold contained within a given size interval responds differently if it belongs to a coarsely or a finely ground ore
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