Discussion – “Problems In Sulfide Ore Processing” – Discussion – Fuerstenau, M. C.

The failure of finely-divided sulfide particles to respond to flotation has resulted in a significant loss of our natural resources. As mentioned by Professor Arbiter, the overall recovery of copper from porphyry copper ores is generally between 80 and 85 percent. The recovery of copper sulfides from these ores is about 90 percent, the difference in these recoveries being due to failure of oxide copper minerals to respond to flotation. The 10-percent loss of sulfide copper has not been studied. Losses are known to be in the fractions finer than 74 microns, but the sizes that are not responding to flotation have not been established. In the case of molybdenite, however, it is known that particles finer than about five microns are not recovered. Work in other systems, notably the hematite-quartz system, has shown that good flotation of very fine particles from natural ores is possible (1, 2). The size distribution of one ore that was researched is given in Table 1, and as shown, approximately 50 percent of the ore was finer than 10 microns. Flotation experiments were conducted with this ore, which contained 45 percent iron, utilizing octyl hydroxamate as collector and without any desliming (1). The results of these experiments are presented in Table 2. From the standpoint of mechanisms of collector adsorption, similarities exist between those occurring in the hydroxamate-hematite system and many xanthate-sulfide systems. .This is, multilayers of ferric hydroxamate are present on hematite under flotation conditions (1,3).