The separation or beneficiation processes are conducted in many devices and concern many various types of minerals and raw materials. The aim of conducting these processes is always to achieve the best possible results allowing as much of the useful component as possible to be obtained by maintaining reasonable costs of the process. Therefore, it is important to have the possibility to monitor the process effects and to have efficient tools to evaluate the course of it. Generally, the ore’s ability to partition into concentrate and tailings is called its efficiency, upgradeability etc. It can be said that there is no unambiguous measure of upgradeability and there are many factors in use which enable to evaluate it qualitatively. Among them are such commonly known parameters as: recovery, losses, yield, upgrading ratio and many others. They are based on three principal parameters that is the average content of the useful component α, the contents of this component in concentrate β and the contents of this component in tailings ϑ. For a given ore (assuming that α = constant), the multi-product separation results can be treated as points of a trajectory located on the surface of factor w in a three dimensional space (β, ϑ, w). The course of the trajectory depends on the ore petrographic and mineralogical properties preparation for the process. For these reasons, searching for optimal (potential) possibilities of the ore is relative, which is presented in the example of Halbich, Fuerstenau and Madej upgrading curves. Such curves are efficient tools to evaluate the course of a separation (beneficiation) process and each of their types allow the effects to be shown in different perspective. Apart from this, they allow also the optimal feed conditions to conduct a certain process with aim of achieving the expected results to be found. Furthermore, the effect of the ore preparation on the flotation results, on the sum of recoveries of the useful component in concentrate and residual recovery in tailings is presented in the paper. The results indicated that any additional contamination of concentrate should be taken into account during the organization of the flotation process. In this way, the results of fractionated flotation have much valuable information to establish the course of the process.

The article concerns investigations over benefits of application of HRC devices into sulphide copper ore processing plant. High pressure comminution appears to be very effective technology in hard ore processing circuits, especially in terms of energy consumption. This can be particularly observed in downstream grinding and beneficiation operations. A series of pilot-scale crushing tests in HRC roller press for various levels of operating pressure, were performed. HRC crushing effectiveness along with downstream grinding process course for each crushing product were also under analysis. The investigations were supplemented by analysis of flotation process effectiveness and impact of the process of high-pressure comminution on environment (dust emission). The results of investigation show that operating pressure level influences the obtained comminution results (comminution degree, yield of finest particle size fractions). The grinding effectiveness, measured through production of the finest particle size fractions was significantly influenced by the operating pressure. The results show that higher values of operating pressure (4.0 and 4.5 N/mm2) are not as efficient within this scope as the pressure 3.5 N/mm2. Dust emission is also correlated with the operating pressure value.