REMOVAL OF DELETERIOUS ELEMENTS FROM COPPER SULFIDE CONCENTRATE

摘要

Currently produced base metal concentrates contain penalty cost minor elements like mercury, arsenic, antimony, which are considered as deleterious impurities. These elements show a harmful influence on the furnace and refining operation. The production of concentrate with a very low content of the penalty cost elements would provide better revenue, and would allow to avoid environmental problems resulting from the production of highly concentrated industrial waste containing these very hazardous heavy metal elements. It was found that the minor elements are very often well disseminated in certain ore mineral components. Successful separation weights heavily on the determination of the qualitative and quantitative relationships between occurrence of the minor elements and their major carriers, and the detailed determination of the mechanisms of surface phenomena taking place between carrier minerals and aqueous solution of different reagents. In this work we show that though the problem is very complex it is possible to find a few key parameters which can be applied to achieve acceptable separation. The fundamental knowledge allows making propositions of new flotation schema of the industrial flowsheet. Some of the proposed modifications were already tested on fall industrial scale showing high environmental and other benefits.