Colloidal Precipitation Of Fatty Acids In Flotation

Many minerals float best with fatty acids in the intermediate pH range. For example, fluorite, a semi soluble salt mineral, exhibits a maximum contact angle and a maximum flotation recovery in the pH range of 6-8 after conditioning in a palmitate solution (fig. 1). The maximum in flotation coincides roughly, as many researchers have observed, with the boundary of bulk precipitation of the fatty acid. According to fig. Z this boundary is in the above case of 5xl0-7 M palmitate approximately at pH 6.3. For assessing the phenomena occurring at the bulk precipitation boundary of fatty acids, the surface tensions of carboxylate solutions have been measured under various conditions. Fig. 3 shows the surface tension development of palmitate and myristate solutions of increasing concentration at pH 12. Also shown are the bulk precipitation edges (BPE) of the respective solid species that is stable under these conditions, that is the potassium acid soap, HKAZ. Both curves display a similar behavior. As the concentration of carboxylat,e increases, the surface tension decreases, until a minimum is reached at which the curves level off. The decrease of surface tension with increasing carboxylate concentration is generally taken to indicate the surface excess of the carboxylate ion. The point where the curve suddenly levels off has not yet been explained. While it is well known that the onset of micellization (CMC) may cause such an inflexion of the surface tension curve, this cannot be the case here because the position of this point depends, as shown in fig. 4 for palmitate, on pH (the CMC is generally independent of pH). We believe that this point indicates the precipitation of a colloidal acid soap (colloidal precipitation edge, CPE) before the bulk precipitation of this species sets in (BPE).