Study on Flotation Technique to Recycle Copper from Tailings

A copper dressing plant in Jiangxi province of China deals with raw ore in the capacity of 185,000 t/a, and its copper recovery is 86.5% while 13.5% copper still remained in tailings, and a considerable amount of copper is lost in coarse particles tailings. Coarse particles with large size and big mass are very easily detached from bubbles in flotation process, so it is difficult for the plant to use original flotation process and equipments to deal with copper ore. To recycle copper from tailings produced by original flotation circuit, laboratorial experiments were carried out, and then recycle system for that tailing was established and two steps beneficiation process was determined. The first step beneficiation only include one rougher bank, and two sets of CGF-40 flotation cells specially designed by BGRIMM(Beijing General Research of Mining and Metallurgy) for coarse mineral particles were used. The second step beneficiation consisted of one rougher bank, one scavenger bank and two cleaner banks, which is designed to further process froth product from step one. Based on that recycle system, the effect of the reagent and the operation parameters on flotation results was also investigated. The industrial test result shows that the copper recovery of entire recycle system is above 20% while the copper grade of 0.3% (equivalent to copper grade of raw ore). It is estimated that 3,000 tons of copper would be recycled per year using this flotation technique.