Abstract
The use of mixtures of thiol collectors is reportedly beneficial in sulfide flotation. This is becoming standard practice for many concentrators, but process water recirculation and re-use in flotation circuits may compromise the behaviour of such mixtures owing to changes in physicochemical interactions occurring in the pulp phase as a result of water quality variations. It is expected that changes in the pulp chemistry would in turn affect both the pulp and froth phase phenomena, thereby affecting flotation performance. Thus, this study considers mixtures of thiol collectors, sodium iso-butyl xanthate (SIBX), and sodium di-ethyl dithiophosphate (SEDTP) in degrading water quality. Bench-scale flotation tests were conducted on various molar ratios of the selected thiol collectors under different ionic strengths (0.0242 mol·dm−3 and 0.1212 mol·dm−3) of synthetic plant water. Increasing the ionic strength of synthetic plant water and SEDTP molar ratio resulted in an increase in water, solids, Cu, and Ni recoveries. Cu-Ni grades decreased in increasing SEDTP molar ratios. The highest Cu-Ni grades were obtained in degrading water quality. The increase in water and solids recoveries in increasing SEDTP and ionic strength of plant water is attributed to an increase in froth stability. It can be concluded that the increase in the ionic strength of plant water increased water recoveries and therefore froth stability in parallel with SEDTP’s froth stabilizing effect, thus suggesting an additive interaction on the froth stabilisation effect seen.
Highlights
The mining industry is faced with a challenge of developing innovative, economical, and environmentally safe methods by which the base metal sulfides and platinum group minerals contained in value bearing ore bodies can be extracted and separated from non-sulfide gangue
As the aim of this investigation was to investigate the effect of thiol collector mixtures in plant water of increasing ionic strength on the recovery and grade of valuable minerals, Cu and Ni from a Cu-Ni-PGM bearing Merensky ore, this section presents the results and discussion of this investigation
Mixture is in agreement with studies that showed that water and solids recoveries both increased with an increase in the ionic strength of plant water; these were conducted in the presence of sodium iso-butyl xanthate (SIBX) as the only collector [16,19,40]
Summary
The mining industry is faced with a challenge of developing innovative, economical, and environmentally safe methods by which the base metal sulfides and platinum group minerals contained in value bearing ore bodies can be extracted and separated from non-sulfide gangue. Current approaches have sought to complement or improve existing techniques. One such existing technique is froth flotation. This technique exploits the differences in the physico-chemical properties of minerals present in the ore so as to separate valuable minerals from gangue. It is, acknowledged that this technique is complex in that it has to be carefully controlled so as to selectively float the value-bearing sulfides from the non-sulfide gangue minerals. The management and control of this process requires an in-depth understanding and knowledge of the effects that hydrodynamic and Minerals 2020, 10, 123; doi:10.3390/min10020123 www.mdpi.com/journal/minerals
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