With the development of industry in recent years, the demand for antimony in the international market is strong, and antimony sulfide ore with good selectivity is decreasing day by day. Antimony oxide ore is increasingly depleted, and it is difficult to achieve high-performance separation by conventional flotation. The main reasons are : Useful minerals have finer disseminated grain size; the symbiosis with other minerals is more complicated; the floatability is extremely poor; the surface properties are very similar to those of gangues. Antimony oxide ore is one of the refractory ores and the high efficient flotation of antimony oxide ore is recognized one of the most difficulty beneficiation problems in the world.
In the production practice of antimony oxide minerals globally, gravity separation is usually used, but the recovery index is significantly lower, usually less than 20%. In many years the main research has been to adopt manual separation, gravity separation, flotation, sulfide flotation, and combined gravity separation and flotation etc processes in order to improve the recovery of antimony oxide ore.
Through years of research, Florrea MaxSb solution for antimony oxide ores has made breakthrough progress and has been successfully applied in industrial production as world's leading flotation technology.
1. Two difficulty problems in flotation of antimony oxide ore
(1) The recovery of fine-particle antimony oxide minerals is low.
A lot of research work has been done on the flotation of antimony oxide minerals over years, but the effect is not good.
(2) Heavy metal ions such as lead nitrate cause environmental pollution and reduce the grade of concentrate.
A large amount of lead and copper ions are added to activate antimony oxide minerals, or potassium dichromate to inhibit antimonite during flotation. Lead nitrate is a toxic heavy metal salt. Some of these heavy metal ions will be discharged with the mineral processing wastewater to cause environmental pollution, and some will eventually enter the antimony concentrate, which will cause trouble for the subsequent smelting process. Research on the use of less or no heavy metal ion modifiers is the focus.
Florrea MaxSb Solution was developed to overcome the shortcomings in conventional flotation of antimony oxide minerals. Florrea’s new-style flotation reagents including antimony collectors and activators can collect antimony under 0 electric potential. They are environmental friendly and safe discharged. These reagents are suitable to the bulk flotation of antimony oxide ore and antimony sulfide ore or single flotation of antimony oxide ore and antimony sulfide ore. Their benefits are following:
There’s no need to add lead salt or copper salt,which can avoid the harmful elements in tailings.
No lead or copper elements in recovered concentrate to improve the grade.
The recovery is higher than that of other reagents. No need to supplement activators when vulcanizing in flotation.
2. Process and Reagents Scheme of Florrea MaxSb Solution
The Florrea flotation process of antimony oxide ore adopts synchronous flotation and asynchronous flotation process, using water glass, oxalic acid as modifier and Florrea 622, Florrea 627 activators to form an activation system, and using high-efficiency antimony collectors Florrea 40, Florrea 50 ,which can improve the entire recovery of antimony and the concentrate grade. The antimony concentrate does not contain the harmful element lead ions. The flotation efficiency and flotation recovery of antimony oxide are greatly improved. This technology and reagents scheme can realize the one-time flotation of mixed antimony sulfide minerals and antimony oxide minerals, no need for vulcanization and oxidation to separate flotation, which greatly shortens the the antimony oxide ore flotation process.
3. Successful Case
A complex antimony ore, Florrea supplied a feasible flotation solution for them and selectively floated antimony oxide minerals or silver gold entities through the use of Florrea reagents.
The ore pre-concentration part has been almost completed. Antimony minerals exist in oxides. The concentration method is not effective in antimony flotation. The ore materials that contain silver and gold in the sulfide entities (according to the previous flotation test, part of the gold and silver entities can be collected through sulfide flotation).
The average grade of antimony and silver are 3% Sb and 30 g/t Ag. The ore contains antimony oxide minerals, such as tungsten lead ore, cerium lead ore and lead ore.
This project has two production lines, the first line floats gold, silver and other minerals, the second line recovers antimony oxide.
With Florrea solution and reagents, the silver recovery rate reached 95%, and the recovery of antimony oxide reached 85-95% finally.
Florrea can also design the flotation plant, flotation machines, production commissioning, workers’ training and annually technical service in the future.
