Enrichment of mica in copper tailings

Copper tailings samples contain a large amount of mica minerals, accounting for about 14.75% of the total mineral content of the samples, mainly biotite, which can be recycled to realize the resource utilization of useful minerals.

At present, mica recovery is mainly through flotation process, and combined beneficiation processes such as "gravity separation-flotation" and "magnetic separation-flotation" are also used. There are two main flotation processes: one is under acidic slurry conditions, Use cationic collectors to float mica; the other is to use anionic collectors to float mica under neutral or weakly alkaline slurry conditions. The quality and recovery rate of mica concentrate products of this method are not as good as the acidic slurry flotation method. .

Since mica minerals have weak magnetism, strong magnetic separation technology can be considered for preliminary enrichment and recovery, and then the enriched coarse concentrates can be gravity-selected to obtain high-quality mica concentrates.

(1) Magnetic separation rough selection experiment

The specific magnetization coefficient of biotite mineral is (57.81 ~ 52.60) × 10-9m3/kg, which has weak magnetism. It can be enriched using strong magnetic technology to remove a large amount of tailings and reduce the selection amount for the next step of selection operation. Using the tailings after iron separation as raw material, magnetic separation roughing experiments were carried out.

It can be seen from the experimental results of rough magnetic separation that as the magnetic field intensity increases, the K2O grade shows a trend of first increasing and then decreasing, and the operating recovery rate shows a trend of first increasing rapidly and then leveling off. Taking into account the mica mineral K2O grade and operation recovery rate, the magnetic field intensity is determined to be 11000 Oe (1.1 T).

(2) Re-selection of selected experiments

A shaking table classification and gravity separation experiment was carried out using the magnetic roughing concentrate as raw material. The magnetic roughing concentrate was first classified. The -0.074 mm particle size was directly used as tailings due to its fine particle size and low grade; the +0.074 mm particle size was classified as heavy. The results of the beneficiation experiment show that the -0.074 mm particle size product is directly discarded as tailings, and the remaining +0.074 mm particle size is sent to the shaking table for gravity separation, and a mica concentrate with a K2O grade of 7.77% and an operating recovery rate of 42.26% can be obtained. Give this text some titles