Common Questions about Copper Dressing Technology
2019-05-17 18:12:48xinhai
The ore properties of the ore dressing plant that to be selected determines the ore dressing process, for example, the nature of the copper ore directly determines the subsequent equipment and copper ore dressing technology. There are many mineral processing methods, what determines the specific method is ore types. Including the size of the block, the type of the ore, the way of the block, the structure of the ore, and so on.
Copper is one of the earliest discovery and use of metals, and in the bronze age, copper is widely used as a variety of sculpture and weapons, while in modern society, copper is widely used in electrical,electronic, machinery manufacturing and other industries. The use has very wide range. At present, China's copper ore mining grade in 0.5~0.4%, and ore structure is complex, distribution of disseminated uneven, symbiotic,associated with a variety of useful and harmful components, so the selection and smelting conditions are complex. According to different types of copper ore, the process of copper mine used in industrial production is not the same.
Copper ore refers to a kind of mineral collector, which contains certain copper, and it can be taken advantages by economic technology. Copper ore processed by benefitation plant has main form of sulfide, which has good natural flotation property. Therefore, flotation is adopted for separation and enrichment.Compared with other minerals, there are so many factors affecting the copper flotation. Only those factors are figured out, and how they affect those index, useful minerals could be made the best recovery, and economic efficient could be improved.
Particle size is an important parameter in copper flotation, which is made certain by experiment of grinding fineness. For the particle size, it should not exceed its upper limit. At the same time, over-fine particle size leads to increasing of energy consumption, and sluding of ore. Those factors affect flotation index. Suitable flotation reagents are adopted for coarse and fine minerals. Reagent system refers to its kind and using amount, order, location and ways (one time or several time divided), compound method, its effecting time, and others.Those are important operation parameters in copper flotation process, which has enormous effect on flotation index. Concentration of slurry means the amount of solid contatint in slurry. Usually it refers to quality ration between solid and liquid, which is expressed by Wg. Slurry concentration has big effect on recovery rate of concentrate, grade, and amount of reagents. Foam flotation is adopted in liquid-gas separation process. Therefore, foam plays an important role. Its physical and chemical properties like stability, thickeness of foam layer, structure, way of producing foam, size and quantity all influence flotation indexes.
There are also many factors influencing copper flotation, like slurry temperature, pH,hardness of water, slurry contatint, inflatable amount, and stirring intensity. When copper flotation process is designed, those indexes should be made sure according to the beneficiation experiment.
The configuration and process design of copper dressing plant is similar to others, but due to its characteristics, there is difference in the choosing of equipment and process. Mineral processing process includes exploration and mining, transportation, crushing, grinding operation, selection process,filter recovery. Because the specificity, there will add or reduce several of them, for example, if the content of mineral mud is high there will be washing process. The process design of a copper dressing plant should according to the copper nature and the selection of beneficiation equipment is also important which is directly related to whether to get the best separation effect.
In copper compounds, the single sulfide ore is less,and most are multi-metal sulfide ore. According to the characteristics of multi-metal sulfide ore, can use mixed flotation, selective flotation, mixed selective flotation, flotation and gravity separation method, flotation and magnetic separation, flotation combined beneficiation method and wet smelting method and so on. Because the ore grade is low, in order to save the cost of ore dressing, usually do not use selective flotation flow sheet, instead using the mixed flotation process of mixed flotation. The copper ore grade is low,while smelting required high grade copper concentrate, so copper ore choosing usually need multi segment selection process. The copper ore in the flotation process will be mixed together to other sulfide minerals, so often need to carry copper sulfur separation process.
Although oxidized copper ore is seldom used in industrial production, with the continuous consumption of sulfide ore, the processing technology of oxidized copper ore is more important. The oxidized copper processing technology is mainly divided into two kinds: flotation process and leaching process. The flotation process can be divided into direct flotation process and indirect flotation process. The direct flotation process is to find efficient flotation reagents. The key is to find good curing agent.The leaching process can be divided into acid leaching, ammonia leaching and bacterial leaching. Methods for the leaching of oxidized copper ores by the kind of microorganisms. Process as shown below.
The equipment needed in domestic copper ore dressing plants are complex because of the property of copper ore. However, the main dressing equipment for copper ore are the same as other ores, including crushing, grinding, flotation separating, filtering and dewatering equipment. Given the sliming and associated ore phenomenon of copper ore, additional devices and multiple flotation series are necessary. Before deciding the copper ore dressing equipment, the analysis of the dressing process must be first carried out. And the option for dressing process is determined by the characteristics of the ore for sorting. The primary metal ore is copper pyrites, lesser is bornite and malachite;and the minor is chalcocite, covelline and azurite. The gauge minerals are mainly composed of dolomite and Carbide dolomite. With particle size of 0.03 to 0.2 mm, medium hardness of 2.85 t/m³, the Cu bearing of the raw copper pyrites is 0.7~1%, the oxidation rate less than 10% and binding rate between 2~3%. Under such conditions, the copper dressing process used is as follow: the crushing process use the three-stage open circuits, with less than 10% final crushing product more than 18 mm; the grinding process is two-stage continuous grinding process, with 75 to 85% density, 44 to 50% overflow density and C=100% sand return cycle load in first stage; the flotation separating process is “one roughing, three concentrating and one scavenging”, with 10 to 15% feeding density of thickeners and riffling particle size more than 60%.
Flotation of copper oxide ore can be divided into direct flotation method and sulfide flotation method. The crux of direct flotation method is finding high efficient collector and the crux of sulfide flotation method is vulcanization used mix agent. The following is an introduction to the agent used in the flotation of copper oxide ore.
The collector of flotation. The earliest collector used is fatty acid. Because of the low selectivity, it is difficult to separate the copper from gangue when the content of calcite and dolomite is high. The research shows collecting performance of Alkyl sulfate, alkyl sulfonates, alkyl phosphonic acid salt is just so so and the main collector is xanthate belongs to hydrogen sulfide. Mercaptan and sulfur compounds is used in flotation of copper oxide ore contain carbonate. But this kind of agent is dosage, odor and poisonous. Nonionic polarity collector of isopropyl ethylformate selectivity than xanthate, but needs further research.
1. Columbia 1000t/d Copper Dressing Plant Project
2. Yunnan 1000tpd Copper Dressing Plant Project
3. Mexico 1500tpd Cu-Pb-Zn Multi-metal Dressing Plant Project
