ENERGY EFFICIENCY INCREASING OF ORE ENRICHMENT WASTES’ PROCESSING BY ELECTRICAL DISCHARGE METHOD

Abstract

A promising and accessible raw material, comparable in terms of gold and silver content to natural ore deposits, is the lying tailings of ore flotation. Currently, billions of tons of ore tailings have been accumulated, the content of valuable components in which sometimes exceeds those in natural deposits. The processing of ore tailings from tailings for the extraction of non-ferrous metals in most cases requires complex beneficiation schemes, and in terms of technical and economic indicators and the quality of concentrates, they are uncompetitive compared to products of natural raw materials. An electric discharge method of disintegration of ore beneficiation waste to increase the number of available target components, based on the rational organization of crushing and grinding processes in relation to beneficiation tasks, was experimentally investigated. The pressure values of the compression waves generated by the electric discharge were determined to calculate the radius of effective selective influence on the studied waste samples of flotation beneficiation of copper-zinc ores. The necessary conditions for the effective operation of the technological part of the equipment are established: in the volume of the disintegrator, the pressure, created by the electric discharge, should not be less than the tensile strength of the processed material and at the same time should not exceed the strength of the disintegrator’s material. The use of the electric discharge method ensures the selectivity of disintegration of the material along the interphase boundary "dead rock - mineral inclusion", this circumstance allows to achieve a significant increase in the amount of mined valuable metals and simultaneously reduction of energy consumption by 2 - 4 times. Increasing energy efficiency is considered by the way of example with copper-zinc ore concentration’s waste. The increase in the number of target metals available in wastes of flotation concentration of copper-zinc ore after their electric discharge treatment is shown. The increase in the amount of copper extracted from copper-zinc ore enrichment waste was from 40 to 93% by mass, extracted zinc - from 39 to 94% by mass, silver extracted - from 16 to 50% by mass.