Russia and South Africa are the world’s leading producers of platinum group elements (PGEs). This places them in a unique position regarding the supply of these two key industrial commodities. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comparative high-level overview of aspects of the geological occurrence, mineralogy, and processing by flotation of the platinum group minerals (PGMs) found in each country. A summary of some of the major challenges faced in each country in terms of the concentration of the ores by flotation is presented alongside the opportunities that exist to increase the production of the respective metals. These include the more efficient recovery of minerals such as arsenides and tellurides, the management of siliceous gangue and chromite in the processing of these ores, and, especially in Russia, the development of novel processing routes to recover PGEs from relatively low grade ores occurring in dunites, black shale ores and in vanadium-iron-titanium-sulphide oxide formations.
in the conditions of significant variability of processed polymetallic ores of the Akbastau Deposit, it is essential to minimize the variability of technological indicators of enrichment. Due to the multifactorial nature and non-linearity of the flotation process, the use of classical regression models does not provide the necessary level of reliability, therefore, there is a significant variability in the extraction of precious metals. To solve this problem, the paper substantiates the use of the neural network modeling methodology, which allows to estimate the variability of gold and silver extraction depending on the variation of the content of metals in the ore.
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