In the previous topic, we looked at an beneficiation process to separate coal from its gangue.

Some of the
principles we discussed in the previous topic are applicable to the separation of metalliferous ores from
their gangue. 2But some of them are different. In this topic, we'll see what the differences are. A
fundamental difference between coal and metalliferous ores is the fact that coal, when it's mined,
separates
relatively readily from its gangue materials, or its mineral materials, whereas metalliferous ores tend to be
intimately associated and must be ground to a very fine powder in order to make them separate. That
means that the density separation method we talked about in the beneficiation of coal don't work as
effectively when the particles a very small because even though density can be used as a separation
principle, the rates of settling in very fine particles are so slow that the processes become uneconomical.
Instead, we need to use more efficient processes. And the one that's commonly adopted is a process
called flotation. Flotation utilises the fact that the metalliferous ore particles, and the gangue minerals,
have different interactions with water.

Fundamentally, flotation relies on the fact that hydrophobic ore particles and hydrophilic gangue particles
can be separated. Hydrophobic means water fearing, and hydrophobic substances fundamentally repel
water. Hydrophilic means water loving, and these are attracted to water. In flotation, we create bubbles at
a froth that sits on the top of a suspension of crushed ore. The hydrophobic ore particles, which don't like
to stay in the suspension, preferentially petition to the surface of the bubbles while the gangue minerals,
which are happy to stay as a suspension, stay in the water below the froth and sink to the bottom. If the
froth is continually replenished, then the ore particles float to the surface in the froth, which can be
skimmed off, and the ore particles recovered.

To enhance the formation of a froth, we add chemicals, called frothers, which are surfactants like
detergents
which help to create small bubbles and a stable layer of froth at the surface. There are four basic types of
flotation cells-- mechanical, column, Jameson, and reflux flotation cells. And there are many variations on
these basic themes. We'll have a look at the simplest of these, the mechanical floating cell. Mechanical
flotation cells consist of a stirred tank. Air is sucked in via a central motor shaft, and the spinning impeller
acts to break the gas into fine bubbles, as well as to keep the solid particles suspended. The bubbles rose
to the surface, forming a froth layer, hopefully carrying the hydrophobic oil particles with them. This froth
overflows and is collected as the concentrate. Water is also withdrawn from the base of the cell to remove
the uncollected solids in a tailing stream.

We can was the entrained gangue mineral from the froth layer by adding wash water. Coal is somewhat
naturally hydrophobic, and so it can be readily located. However, most mineral ores are naturally
hydrophilic. What makes flotation such a powerful tool for mineral processing is that we have learned how
to selectively modify the surface properties of different ore minerals to make them hydrophobic. We use
various types of chemicals, remembering that we've already spoken about frothers. But there are also
collectors, activators, and depressants to control the particle's surface properties.A collector makes the
surface of a particle hydrophobic. And activator makes a particle's surface more responsive to the
collector. A depressant makes the surface of unwanted particles less responsive to collector. We can also
an acids and bases as pH modifiers to control the responses of minerals to the collector. Flotation has the
capacity to recover different mineral species at different stages in the process.

In this way, we can beneficiate complex mixtures of ores to produce a range of different mineral products.
To illustrate the power of the flotation process, consider this sample of low grade copper ore. If this
copper ore was crushed to produce a feed stream for a flotation process, we end up with a powder that
looks like this.
After flotation, we produce a stream of tailings that looks like this and a stream of recovered ore that looks
like this. Floatation is a powerful tool to recover small amounts of valuable minerals from low grade ores.
So having generated our product, the next task is to get to the customer. We'll take a look at how this is
done in the next topic.