Beneficiation of low-grade collophane by a novel combined enhanced gravity separation-flotation process

ABSTRACT

The application of gravity separation in flotation process of collophane can reduce the reagent consumption. Aiming at the poor pre-separation performance of conventional gravity separators, this work introduced enhanced gravity separation technology into the flotation process of low-grade collophane. After enhanced gravity separator treating, the P₂O₅ grade of collophane increased from 14.84% to 20.26% with a recovery of 79.55% under the optimal conditions (GF of 78.56 wt%, FR of 22.04 ml/s, RF of 44.50 Hz, and BWP of 0.02 Mpa). Compared with conventional gravity separators, the P₂O₅ recovery has been significantly increased by nearly 30%, and the P₂O₅ grade (7.27%) of tailings has been reduced remarkably, which is a considerable breakthrough in the gravity pre-separation direction of low-grade collophane. On this basis, a novel combined enhanced gravity separation-flotation process was proposed. Compared with the existing research findings, the novel process has the advantages of simplicity and high efficiency, which can not only ensure the separation indexes, but also reduce the beneficiation cost and environmental pollution. The introduction of enhanced gravity separator makes the combined enhanced gravity separation-flotation process become an effective and prospective approach in the separation of low-grade collophane, especially in the face of increasingly serious environmental problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Enhanced gravity separation
• adsorption mechanism
• flotation
• low-grade collophane
• combined process

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2019XKQYMS45), the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (KYCX22_2636), and the Graduate Innovation Program of China University of Mining and Technology (2022WLKXJ061).