Gold Extraction & Recovery Processes
Process Development Considering the different gold minerals present alone or combined with the host rock, it will be necessary to discharge the unwanted material in order to increase the concentration of gold in an economically manner. This part treats the strategy of beneficiation as a combination of several processes. Joining together these units make possible […]
Auriferous Deposits
Gold and elements of the platinum group metals have been found in several types of deposits around the world. Sometimes, deposits have been worked for their cobble and gravel components and these places have been set up to recover heavy minerals (mainly as black sands) from their host rock. These minerals carry precious metals and […]
Basic Gold Prospecting & Exploration Methods
Prospecting and exploration that is a search for precious metals deposits is not a simple process because big deposits were discovered a long time ago. There are several places with important content of precious metals waiting for skill prospectors. The large mining companies of the world are focused in big deposits and the small deposits […]
Column Cells
Flotation cells can be divided in two groups: mechanical and pneumatic machines. The first group comprises the traditional cells which employ a mechanical agitation, and the second group is related to pneumatic cells which do not have mechanical devices for maintaining the slurry under agitation. Columns offer the advantages of counter current contact between slurry […]
Gold Smelting & Refining Process
Gold can be concentrated and recovered by applying different gold refining process methods and the final product has variable quality. In this way, it is necessary to have a better marketable product so that the incomes can be improved. Then, we have two smelt and cast the gold into bars called bullion or Dore. The […]
Lead-Bismuth Flotation
Often we hear that copper concentrates have contaminants which affect the incomes to be obtained by commercialization. Well, one of the worst contaminant is bismuth because is difficult to remove during smelting process and the metallic copper to be obtained at the end of the process will be brittle and consequently its mechanical properties will be […]
Rotary Drilling & Core Sampling
During the past few years the taking of cores in drilling with rotary equipment has been perfected to a remarkable degree in the Gulf Coast fields of Texas and Louisiana. Taking of cores is becoming quite a common thing, especially in the newer fields, and drillers are becoming expert in this work. The writer has […]
Sampling and Estimating Disseminated Copper Deposits
The sampling of disseminated copper deposits has been described often but the method of combining assays to give the true shape and value of the orebody as it will be mined has received less attention. As the ore mined during five or ten years at several of the great disseminated properties has averaged materially lower […]
Why do Metals Float
Some of the fundamental principles of this concentration ‘upside down,’ as it may be termed, being such a new method, have been overlooked. There has been such a mad scramble to get results in advance of the ‘other fellow,’ and to penetrate the cloud of secrecy enforced by patent litigation, that there has been little […]
Chemistry of Enrichment of Silver Deposits
The processes of superficial alteration depend on physical conditions, environment, geologic history and chemical and mineralogical composition. Superficial alteration is confined particularly to the zone of shallow circulation, as this is the zone of solution; its rocks are open and the circulation within it is comparatively rapid. The enrichment of ore deposits in this zone, […]