Flotation Tech of Coarse Ore Facilitates The Sustainability in Mining Industry (One)

The coarse-grained ore flotation technology has many important advantages, including reducing ore crushing cost, reducing energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, improving ore processing capacity of concentrators, and improving tailings and water resources management. Suppliers of Flotation reagents in the mining industry have noticed that mining enterprises pay more and more attention to improving sustainability, so they are more and more interested in coarse-grained ore flotation technology. 

Grinding ore fine or reducing ore particle size is helpful for flotation, but which will increase energy consumption. An important advantage of flotation of ores with coarse particle size is to reduce energy consumption and grinding cost while ensuring the recovery rate of target minerals. According to a report commissioned by the Weir Group and released in May this year, ore crushing is the most energy-consuming process in the mine site, usually accounting for 25 % of the final total energy consumption.

Todd Parker, Global Marketing Director of mineral chemicals, Arkema-ArrMaz, said that If a mineral is dissociated by natural means, the ore must be floated under being natural particle size, with flotation process. Whether the coarse-grained ore can be floated, the particle size classification of the ore will play a key role. Ores of different sizes are classified according to similar particle size ranges, beneficiation processes are designed, and beneficiation equipment and reagents are selected to maximize concentrate grade and beneficiation recovery. This method has enabled many deposits around the world to achieve profitable mining. Grinding and flotation of ore under the condition of the coarsest possible particle size can reduce beneficiation cost while meeting the requirements of concentrate grade and beneficiation recovery. 

In addition to reducing the energy consumption of mineral processing, the role of coarse particle flotation technology in reducing the consumption of water resources in mineral processing has also attracted more and more attention. For mine production, especially in water scarcity areas, reducing water consumption is an important challenge to improve sustainability.

If the coarse ore is processed, it is easier to recover as much water as possible from the tailings before the tailings are deposited in the tailings pond. Tarun Bhambhani, the chief scientist at Solvay, said that this approach also makes tailings more suitable for dry storage, allowing more wastewater to be recovered from tailings. These water resources protection strategies are very important to realize the “closed water circulation system”. In such systems, more water is recycled and reused, so as to minimize the amount of fresh water. Increasing the recovery rate in a new flotation tank designed for coarse particle flotation will directly help to achieve the goal of sustainable water resources. Mining enterprises, flotation tank manufacturers, and mineral processing reagent suppliers are increasingly aware that new and improved reagents must be used to optimize the flotation process in the new flotation tank if the recovery rate of coarse ore is to be improved.  (Source: Geological Literature Center of China Geological Survey)

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