How to wash gold ore with high mud content

date icon March.22,2024

When raw gold ore contains a large amount of slime, it usually makes flotation difficult. Clayy sludge easily covers the surface of gold ore particles, making it difficult to float and reducing the recovery rate; while sludge composed of iron and manganese oxides will also increase the consumption of chemicals and increase flotation costs. Therefore, the presence of a large amount of slime causes the fine-grained flotation speed to slow down, the selectivity to become poor, the recovery rate to decrease, and the quality of fine products to be low.

Methods for removing slime from gold mines

1. Wash away the slime through ore washing equipment
Ore washing is an effective solution to eliminate the impact of slime on flotation results. The specific measures are to add a vibrating screen to wash the ore after the first stage of crushing. The ore is removed from the slime part through the ore washing process. The screened slime is processed by a spiral classifier. The returned sand enters the fine ore bin or is directly ground. Classification overflow and grinding The products can be flotated together or separately. The graded overflow with relatively low grade can be discharged directly together with the tailings. At the same time, waste rocks can also be manually removed from the ore blocks on the ore washing screen to improve the selection grade and sorting efficiency.

sand sieve machine
2. Separate part of the slime with a hydrocyclone before flotation.

If the mud content in the slime is high, the deslimed slime can be flotated separately. At this time, separate flotation of fine mud should use a longer flotation time, maintain a high concentration of slurry (60%-70% pulp concentration), low concentration flotation (generally below 20%), and increase the collector. Dosage, reduce the amount of foaming agent, maintain large aeration volume, small bubbles, and weaken the rising slurry flow. For sludge with very low gold content, a small amount of frother can be added to remove it by flotation before flotation.