A Study On The Improvement Of Copper Recovery From A Copper Sulfide Ore In Hubei Province

The annual processing capacity of a copper sulphide ore in Hubei Province is about3 million tons,and the main minerals are chalcopyrite,pyrite and magnetite.The valuable minerals Cu is about 0.43%,and the distribution of chalcopyrite is about 92%.The present process indexe is that the grade of copper concentrate is 18%?20% and copper recovery is 70%?80%.In order to increase the copper recover of the ore,a flotation test by using new type collectors was studied,which is based on the process mineralogy study.Besides,the test results were compared the laboratory closed circuit test results,which is a simulate production engineering test.The experimental results show as follows: Choise HZ-1(25%w)and HZ-C9(75%w)as the collector for Cu-S bulk flotation,and Z-200 as the collector for Cu-S separate flotation.The flotation process of one roughing,two selection and three scavenging was used by Cu-S bulk flotation and Cu-S separate flotation in the laboratory closed-circuit flotation tests.The results indicated that a good indexes of flotation can be obtained in laboratory closed-circuit tests.The grade of copper concentrate is 21.51% and copper recovery is 84.61%.Compared with the simulate production engineering test index,the grade of copper concentrate is basically same,while the recovery increased 5.38%.Besides,the copper content was reduced from 0.064% to 0.058% in tailings,and it reduced from 0.293% to 0.243% in sulphur.This research has a great significance.It not only provides the data reference for the next industrial test,but also provides reference for the technical transformation of the concentrating mill.