Melnikov Institute of Comprehensive Exploitation of Mineral Resources at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia:

T. N. Matveeva, Head of the Department of Comprehensive Extraction of Minerals from Natural and Secondary Raw Materials, Doctor of Technical Sciences
V. V. Getman, Senior Researcher, Candidate of Technical Sciences, e-mail: viktoriki.v@gmail.com
A. Yu. Karkeshkina, Research Fellow

Processing of porphyry-copper ores is mainly aimed at liberating sulphides intergrown with quartz and conducting sulphide flotation. To raise the recovery of gold into concentrate, one needs a collecting agent that would attach not to the pyrite but to gold directly, which is mainly represented by films on sulphide surface and by latent gold. The Academician Chanturiya School is engaged in systematic basic research aimed at finding new selective collectors for gold and sulphides of non-ferrous metals, conducting experiments to support their use and developing effective reagent flotation regimes on their basis that would be applicable to complex refractory ores. The authors of this paper relied on modern physico-chemical techniques to examine the interaction between dithiopyril methane (DTM) and gold. Because two heterocycles are present in the DTM structure, it can form complex surface compounds with non-ferrous and noble metals. Using UV spectrophotometry, the authors established that the studied reagent is capable of building complex compounds with gold in aqueous solution. The DTM – Au compound has its peak absorption in a 364–370 nm range. It was proved that the adsorption of DTM on pyrite with gold is 2.5 times higher than on the natural mineral. The authors used the methods of scanning electron and scanning laser microscopy to establish the adsorption of the reagent in view on the surface of gold applied to a polished microsection of pyrite. A series of flotation studies was carried out with porphyry-copper ore to demonstrate the effectiveness of DTM. When introduced as an additional reagent to potassium butyl xanthate, DTM helped raise the recovery of the key target metals into bulk flotation concentrate and at the same time of the noble ones. The recovery of copper into concentrate rose by 8.24%, that of silver by 21.34% and that of gold by 9.97%.

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