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Flotation is a complex metallurgical process by which valuable minerals (e.g., copper sulphides) are separated from the gangue minerals (e.g. iron sulphides).

The flotation mechanism depends on many mineralogical, physical and chemical conditions. The valuable minerals should be sufficiently liberated through grinding in order to be concentrated. Nevertheless, care should be taken to avoid overgrinding. Indeed, overgrinding causes the liberation of unwanted gangue minerals and increases grinding cost while introducing more problems with fine particles flotation.

Moreover, the minerals'surface needs to be hydrophobic enough for them to attach to bubbles, rise to the froth zone and report to the concentrate launder of a flotation cell. Note that too fine particles have less chances to collide and attach to bubbles while too coarse particles may easily dettach from bubbles. As with the mineral liberation, only the hydophobicity of valuable minerals is desired but not that of the gangues.

For valuable minerals that are not naturally hydrophobic, chemical reagents (activator, promoter, collector) of known properties and concentration are added to change their surface chemistry. Different types of reagents (depressant) are used to reject the gangue minerals. In cleaner cells, water is sometimes used to wash the entrained gangue particles off the froth and back into the pulp.

Rougher and scavenger banks/cells use shallow froth and high pulp density as they are focussed on recovery. In contrast, cleaner banks/cells target concentrate grade and use deeper froth and low pulp density.
With high throughput, the residence time is low and the recovery decreases. For the same throughput, low pulp density (more water) also reduces the residence time and recovery.

The combination of those multiple processes makes flotation very complex. Due to the cost involved, laboratory tests are commonly used to optimise flotation or assess the effectiveness of new conditions (e.g. new reagent) before implementing them at a pilot plant or industrial scale.

The mass balancing or metallurgical accounting of data from such laboratory flotation tests can be completed on this platform by choosing the corresponding "Flowsheet" from the above menu.
Our mass balancing web applications can be executed from any device connected to the internet, so the user does not have to worry about installing them to a local computer.

The calculated results are presented as:
- Cumulative mass and elemental recoveries.
- Cumulative concentrate grades.
- Recoveries at a given concentrate grade.
- Concentrate grades at a given recovery.
- First order flotation kinetics R = R_max[1-exp(^-kt)].
- Concentrate grade versus recovery curves.
- Recovery versus time curves.
- Selectivity curves.

By using the flotation web applications, you agree to the disclaimer and End User License Agreement section.