Description Of Concentrating Operations, Roan Antelope Copper Mines Limited, Northern Rhodesia

THE Roan Antelope concentrator was originally designed with a nominal milling capacity of 6000 tons of copper ore per day but this was subsequently considerably exceeded. In broad outline the plant consisted of two No. 30 McCully gyratory crushers for coarse crushing, five 5 1/2-ft Standard Symons crushers in open circuit for secondary crushing, ten No. 98 Marcy ball mills arranged in five sections, each two-mill section with primary and secondary Dorr classifiers for two-stage grinding. One stage of flotation roughing was followed by two stages of cleaning, all in airlift type pneumatic flotation machines, with the final concentrates filtered on Oliver drum filters. Tailing was thickened in a 250-ft Dorr traction type thickener before pumping to the tailing dam. Concentrating operations commenced in June 1931, on the completion of the first two ball-milling sections and output was increased during the next few months as the remaining sections were finished. From the start, very few technical difficulties were experienced but a number of evolutionary changes have been made as a result of operating experience and the availability of improved equipment. These have resulted in plant and ore-flow alterations although the general scheme of ore treatment remains substantially as before. The main changes to date were the installation of a new crushing plant at Storke shaft, some 7000 ft west of the original Beatty shaft; the completion of a two-stage secondary crushing plant; an increase of 20 pct in ball-milling capacity; a change-over from pneumatic to a mechanical type of flotation machine for flotation roughing; the reduction of flotation cleaning from two stages to one stage. ORE TREATED Typically the ore treated consists of metamorphosed shales and sandstones with shales as the principal mineral-bearing rock carrying chalcocite, bornite and chalcopyrite as the main copper minerals. Chalcocite predominated in the original eastern end of the ore body but there is a pronounced trend to an increased proportion of the copper-iron sulphides as mining proceeds westward. Although the ore can be described as soft, this advantage is offset by the extremely fine dissemination of the copper minerals which calls for a high degree of comminution of the ore (90 pct minus-200 mesh Tyler standard) to give a reasonably satisfactory separation of mineral from gangue. Latterly, there has been a tendency for the ore to become harder as shown by a reduction in the ball-milling rate from a previous figure of over goo tons per ball-mill day to the present output of some 800 tons. Chalcopyrite is not so finely disseminated and has also proved more amenable to flotation than chalcocite. Nonsulphide minerals are mainly the so-called oxides such as malachite, cuprite and melaconite with some chrysocolla and