Abstract
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.
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