Gravity Concentration Methods

A review of cassiterite beneficiation fundamentals and plant practices

“…Efforts Table 3 Physical and chemical properties of cassiterite (Blackburn and Dennen, 1988 Characteristically found in high-temperature hydrothermal veins or contact metamorphic deposits genetically related to quartzose igneous rocks. Also noted in pegmatites and as an accessory mineral in acid igneous rocks are made to recover these lost values using state of the art fine gravity machines such as Bartles Mozley separator (BMS), Bartles cross belt concentrator (CBC) and more recent Mozley multi-gravity separator (MGS) and Falcon Ultra-Fine centrifugal concentrator (Burt, 1984(Burt, , 1988Mozley and Childs, 1992). However, many plants consider flotation of tin using specific collectors because of the advantages like higher tin selectivity and recovery (Foo et al, 1983).…”

“…The minerals associated with such types of deposits are harder to beneficiate because of fine liberation size. Cassiterite beneficiation flowsheets generally consist of gravity separation units and flotation cells to upgrade the raw material to a marketable grade concentrate (Collins et al, 1968;Polkin et al, 1974;Moncrieff and Lewis, 1977;Burt, 1984;Falcon, 1985;Baldauf et al, 1985;Senior and Poling, 1986).…”

“…Particle size plays a major role in gravity concentration (Burt, 1988); the separation efficiency is very high for coarse particles while it drops down considerably for fine sizes. The efficiency of different gravity concentrators treating tin ores has been investigated by many researchers (Falcon, 1982;Burt, 1984Burt, , 1988Turner and Hallewell, 1993), and it is reported that advanced gravity concentrators could recover particle size down to 3 lm.…”

Modeling of particle fluid interactions in a flowing film concentrator

“…Models that do not quantify particle interaction can thus only provide the most approximate guide to the phenomenon it seeks to describe. Even the relatively modern textbook (Burt, 1984) has progressed very little further in quantifying flowing film separation than the aforementioned Gaudin analysis.…”

Separation by particle shape — The RecGlass device

“…The RecGlass is inspired by two gravity concentration processes (Burt, 1984), the "vanner" (Taggart, 1944), used in the beginning of the 20th century, and the "Bartles crossbelt concentrator", commonly used in the wet processing of sands, to separate fine (5-100 μm) heavy minerals from lighter ones (Burt, 1975). RecGlass was developed to be used in the dry separation of particles with millimetric size.…”