An Improvement on Selective Separation by Applying Ultrasound to Rougher and Re-Cleaner Stages of Copper Flotation

Abstract

<jats:p>It has been known that the power ultrasound is used as a pretreatment and rarely applied as a simultaneous method to improve grade and recovery during froth flotation processes. This work aimed at investigating the impact of simultaneously used ultrasonic waves under variant operating configurations on the flotation of representative porphyry copper ore during rougher and re-cleaner stages. For this purpose, four different operating outlines were examined as (I) conventional flotation, (II) homogenizer, (III) ultrasonic bath, and (IV) combination of a homogenizer and an ultrasonic bath. The ultrasonic vibration was generated by the homogenizer (21 kHz, 1 kW) in the froth zone and ultrasonic bath (35 kHz, 0.3 kW) in the bulk zone. The rougher and re-cleaner flotation experiments were conducted using Denver-type mechanically agitated cells with 4.2 and 1 L capacities, respectively. The results showed that using the homogenizer (at 0.4 kW) slightly affected the selectivity separation index of chalcopyrite and pyrite, although it positively increased the grade of chalcopyrite from 21.5% to 25.7%. The ultrasonic-assisted flotation experiments with the ultrasonic bath and its combination with the homogenizer (0.4 kW) (i.e., configurations III and IV) led to an increase of approximately 16.1% and 26.9% in the chalcopyrite selectivity index compared to the conventional flotation, respectively. At the cleaning stage, a lower grade of aluminum silicate-based minerals was obtained desirably in every ultrasonic-treated configuration, which was supported with the water recoveries. Finally, applying the homogenizer and its combination with the ultrasonic bath were recommended for re-cleaner and rougher stages, respectively. Further fundamental and practical knowledge gaps required to be studied were highlighted.</jats:p>

Effect of Power Ultrasound on Wettability and Collector-Less Floatability of Chalcopyrite, Pyrite and Quartz

“…The beneficiation process can be also evaluated by means of the methodology presented in our previous works [79][80][81][82][83]. We recently presented the impact of configuration of sonication in four states on batch flotation of copper porphyry ore [31].…”

“…Despite there are several investigations indicated the application of ultrasonic waves during the coal flotation processes [17,18,[23][24][25], there is a considerable lack of study on simultaneous ultrasonic vibration in the mineral flotation processes. To the best of the author's knowledge, it is only limited to colemanite [26], graphite [27], galena [28,29], phosphate [30], magnesite [11], ilmenite [12], copper ore [31][32][33][34], copper tailing [35], chalcopyrite [36], scheelite ore [37,38], barite-fluorite-quartz ore [39], lead-zinc-copper ore [40], quartz [13,22] and silica [41,42], calcite and barite [43], talc [44] and feldspar [14] in the literature.…”

Effect of externally adding pyrite and electrical current on galvanic leaching of chalcopyrite concentrate

“…However, Dixon et al (2008) reported that the pyrite to chalcopyrite ratio must be in the range of two to four to achieve a reasonable recovery, and Koleini et al (2010) indicated a mass ratio of over 4. It was reported that pyrite forms hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) by being drawn in water, which is a strong oxidant agent (Nooshabadi et al, 2013;Hassanzadeh et al, 2020). Interestingly, this principle fact and its effectiveness on chalcopyrite electro-leaching have been relatively overlooked in the literature, which needs to be studied in future works.…”

Multidimensional Optimization of the Copper Flotation in a Jameson Cell by Means of Taxonomic Methods

“…The problem of bubble size distribution as well air rate and froth depth were the object of interest in [2,15]. The application of ultrasound at various stages of the copper flotation process was discussed in [16]. One of the main factors for evaluating the quality of the process is the selectivity index.…”