Acidic Pretreatment Of Carbonate Feed In Flotation Circuits

Abstract:

Flotation assisted with acidic non-oxidative leaching of the carbonate feed has been presented. The untreated feed is hardly-upgradeable by standard procedures due to a very fine mineralization and severe problems in liberation of copper-bearing sulphides. The acidic leaching results in chemical effective liberation of copper and valuable met-als sulphide particles finely disseminated in a carbonate gangue. For this leaching a part of the clay-carbonate feed material was separated from the commercial flotation circuit and subjected to leaching with sulfuric acid prior to further flotation. The feed suspension, after non-oxidative leaching, was returned to the flotation circuit in order to separate freshly precipitated gypsum and was finally subjected to cleaning flotation. The combined leaching-flotation process was eventually successfully applied on the in-dustrial scale. In this paper a flotation circuit with acidic leaching of the feed was pre-sented. Flotation indices of the chemically modified feed were compared with the stan-dard system without chemical pretreatment. After several months of operation of the new technological system, a significant increase of copper and other metals recovery was observed along with an increase in concentrate grade. On the basis of technologi-cal experience and additional laboratory investigations application and development of proposed chemical pretreatment and further full hydrometallurgical processing of flota-tion concentrates for improving metals recovery is considered

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