Institute of Comprehensive Exploitation of Mineral Resources RAS (Moscow, Russia)

Solozhenkin P. M., Chief Researcher, Doctor of Engineering Sciences, Professor, solozhenkin@mail.ru

Sulfide mineral surface modifications using metal cations has become widespread in ore processing. This paper provides a substantiation for the interaction of collectors with a cation-modified antimonite surface and for collector adhesion on the mineral surface and applies the molecular modeling method, with a calculation of energy parameters for the flotation complexes of modified antimonite and collectors. Molecular modeling of such complexes was conducted using ChemBio3D software. A modeling technique was proposed for flotation complexes, which includes obtaining a mineral cluster and various sulfhydryl collectors (composites) bound to the mineral atom(s). The complexes obtained by molecular modeling are virtually similar to the compounds generated when a collector adheres to a mineral surface in actual flotation. A collector activity assessment forecast (CAAF) procedure is proposed, designed to establish flotability of a reagent. It assesses the interaction between the collector and a mineral cluster as a difference between the total energy of the complex and the sum of the energies of the cluster and the energy of the collector. The energy parameters have been specified for the above antimonite complexes with the reagents. The calculation results suggest that the lowest collector activity is achieved when using butyl xanthate and dialkyldithiocarbamate as collectors with preliminary modification of the mineral surface with lead ions. The results of the antimonite flotation experiments have confirmed the effectiveness of lead salts: at 50 g/t of lead nitrate, 50 g/t butyl xanthate, and 150 g/t dialkyldithiocarbamate flow rates, antimony recovery improved by 7.6 % as compared to the experiments without the use of lead compounds.

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