Por: Jorge Ganoza, Metalurgista.

Abstract

Flotation is a key technology within the mining industry. It is well known that the idea of recovering coarse particles have remained more or less unchanged since the operations adopted this idea in the engineering design. For that reason, it is important to describe some operations whose mineralogical properties made possible to operate a flotation circuit with a coarse feed.

The comminution processes involve crushing and grinding and they are highly capital intensive and represent the main part of the operating cost at ore processing plants. They are also sometimes inefficient at converting energy into work as particle size is reduced. As a result, coarse flotation practice can spark debates among specialists over how to break the mechanical bonds that lock valuable minerals to a host rock so that they can be exposed and recovered economically at a coarse size.

Some operations of polymetallic ores and copper ores that used mechanical cells in the grinding circuit or cell banks in the primary flotation circuit are described. The results are good and can be used as a reference for designing and/or optimizing flotation operations. Although gold ore flotation has some restrictions with respect to the maximum particle size recoverable by flotation, it is important to describe some operations. Regardless of the type of ore, a fundamental achievement is the so-called control strategy.