Figure 9. The new Urzar Flotation Cell.

Industrial Research in Flotation

Some key development lines are as follows:
Control the froth characteristics and hydrodynamics to (i) Improve concentrate
grade without losing recovery; (ii) Improve middlings recovery and (iii) Reduce the
gangue recovery.
Develop efficient flotation processes in sea water media.
Explore high-productivity non-conventional flotation options: (i) Thin layer flotation
concept; (ii) Centrifugal flotation and (iii) Conventional flotation field-force assisted.
Develop new activation/depression processes based on chemical, electrochemical,
biological or radiative pretreatment.
Water Supply
Water consumption in mining operations has been reduced along the time but requirement
exceed by far availability. Some usual indices are given in Table 3.
Table 3. Water consumption indices.
Tailings Treatment (m
3
/ore ton) Water Consumption
Without treatment 1.5 4.0
Thickening (50 to 60% solids) 1.0 0.6
Paste 0.5 0.3
Filtering 0.33 0.29
How About Sea Water?
Sea water is fastly becoming a significant water source to the Mining Industry.
Desalination is not expensive and transport to final point is often the controlling economic
step. Probably new smart solutions would arise like that shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10. New concepts in water supply.
In Situ Leaching
Even attractive from the economical side, it is not recommendable today, because it is
hard to control, inherently unsafe, hard to meet strict operational control and not an
environmentally benign method of mining. An typical arrangement is shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11. In Situ leaching arrangement.

WARNING
Smelter Technology
Particular features of the smelter technology are as follows:
Smelter operating cost fall sharply as capacity increases. This explains the
increase in typical smelter capacity up to 200 to 300 ktpy and indicates that
smelters will grow much more in the future.
The future will be dominated by huge processing centers. Technology will allow the
development of increasingly continuous processes, with lower pollution levels,
better ways to clean the slags and also to improve recovery of by-products (see
Figure 12).
Costs will continue falling and smelters will remain the main option for treating
concentrates for the foreseeable future.
Modern technology development in the pyrometallurgy field is the basic technology
for the metal-recycle industry.

Figure 12. Pyrometallurgy progress along the time.
Modern Process to Leach Concentrates
Many options are available today. Pressure leach in sulfate media are (i) Placer Dome, (ii)
Activox, (iii) Dynatec, (iv) Anglo American/UBC, (v) Brisa and others. Among pressure
leach processes in chloride media we find: (i) Noranda Antlerite, (ii) BHAS, (iii) CESL and
(iv) Hydrocopper. Bacterial leach options are: (i) BioCop, (ii) Geocoat and (iii) BioHeap,
among many others.
Current applications are found in Mt Gordon, Australia (50 ktons/yr), Phelp Dodge, Bagdad
USA (16 ktons/yr), Sepon Copper, Laos (66 ktons/yr) and CESL Process, CVRD Brazil (10
ktons/yr).
A preferred option is full oxidation of sulphide to sulphate, but sulphuric acid in excess
needs to be spent in an extra operation in order to close the acid balance as shown in
Figure 13.

Figure 13. Concentrate leach flowsheet (D. Dreisinger, New Developmens in Cu and Ni
Hydrometallurgy, JOGMEC, Japan, February 2006).
The Unsolved Puzzle
About 90% of the copper worldwide orebody reserves are sulphide and 10% are oxide.
70% to 80% of the sulphide is chalcopyrite. Many people have spent huge amount of time
and money looking for a hydrometallurgical process for chalcopyrite, which can be
competitive with the standard flotation alternative.
Today chalcopyrite can be industrially bioleached but with a very slow kinetics.
Technological options can be clearly improved but intrinsic limitations probably would
subsist because Nature cannot be overcome. Better bioprocess otions will probably be
developed by handling variables like those included in Figure 14.
Sulphide Ore Oxide Ore
Flotation Heap Leach
SX/EW
Cathode
Bioleach
Smelting/Refining

Figure 14. Bioleaching factors.
Under high copper price conditions bioleaching is an attractive business only for grades
below the Concentrator Cu-grade and conversely, its application may significantly increase
under low international copper prices.
Current copper hydro-production in Chile represents 36% of the overall production (2012),
but in the year 2020 just 27% is expected to holds.
Bioleaching or Chloride Leaching?
Chloride media instead of sulphate media gives a new air to Hydrometallurgy looking for
better wet methods to recover copper from sulphides, especially from chalcopyrite. The
virtuous cycle given by microorganisms is replaced by another virtuous machine given by
the stability of the cuprous copper within a chloride-concentrated brine as illustrated in
Figure 15.
Sulfide
Content
CO
2
in
Airflow
Oxygen in
Airflow
Raffinate
Flowrate
Air
Flowrate
Fe
2+
/Fe
3+
in
Raffinate
Bacterial
Activity
Air
Temperature
Raffinate
Temperature
Acid in
Raffinate
Bacteria Growth (Fe
2+
)
Fe
3+
Generation
Sulfide Oxidation
Copper Dissolution
Fe
2+
Regeneration

Figure 15. Chemical or biological virtuous machine? (Muller et al., US Patent 8,070,851
B2, December 2011, also D. Dixon, Think Tank 2000, Phelp Dodge Phoenix Az., October
2000).
In Summary
Bioleaching of low grade chalcopyrite ores is today technically feasible.
Appropriate blend of ores assuring sufficient supply of internal heat, combined with
an external energy source and a heap engineered to minimize heat loss, are
necessary conditions to activate the virtuous cycle leading to copper dissolution.
Dont be surprised! A chemical route to leach chalcopyrite low-grade ores can be
closer than bioleaching.
Anyway, leaching of low-grade chalcopyrite ores is limited to cases where (i)
technical conditions are appropriate and (ii) the Concentrator route is not
competitive; the higher the copper prices the lower the field of application of the
heap leaching option.
How about Soft Developments?
The Continuum Mechanics is sharing her throne with Discrete Element Modeling due to
present availability of powerful computing machines, eventhough more power is needed.
Also massive introduction of web monitoring applications and automatic control solutions
under cloud computing frames are expected to come soon to the Mining Business, as
illustrated in Figure 16.
Heat losses
Air
Liquid
Heat losses
HEAT
GENERATION
Strain catalysed
Chloride catalysed
Overall Reaction
Virtuous Cycles

Figure 16. New phenomena modeling and communication ways.
Dreaming the Future
Among the challenges we may find:
New energy and water sources
Lower material consumption
Higher efficiency of separation
Faster process kinetics
Environmental friendship
Lower energy demand
Higher capacity per unit volume
Less steps and more continuity
Robotics/sensing devices and cloud computing.
It is not clear that future incremental process efficiency would be able to overcome the
incremental capacity demand to get less contaminant release as a balance.
A different strategy will evolve such that all mine streams become useful products, either
as a saleable product or lying in a benign manner on the mine site. Control of contaminant
is today an environmental imposition but in the future it will be a business opportunity.
DISCRETE ELEMENT MODELING
Particle multiphysics modelling
DEM (dynamic of granular material)
XDEM (DEM + thermodynamics state,
stress/strain state, electromagnetic
state or similar)
CONTINUUM MECHANICS MODELING
Phenomenological modelling, requiring
constitutive equations.
Finite element, finite difference and
boundary element
NEW SOFTWARE
DEVELOPMENT
Design
Optimisation
Control
R&D; IT
CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT
Social communication
networks will be fastly
expanded to technical
applications
One key concept which will dramatically change the Metal Extractive Metallurgy
Technology within the next thirty years is theover imposition of field forces to body
forces used in current technology (J. Menacho, The Concentrator Plant in the Year 2010,
Proceeding Sixth ARMCO Symposium on Grinding, Via del Mar, Chile, November 1990,
pp 205-321).
Field forces moves as waves, either mechanical or electromagnetic, whether a material
media is needed or not to propagate. Microwave field; infrared radiation; electric and
magnetic fields; ultrasonics and similar are among the golden keys to improve the
extractive processes since the blasting up to cathode production.
Current examples can be found in: Solution heating by magnetic induction; Ultrasonic
devices for material grinding; Magneto-hydrodynamics in pyrometallurgical furnaces,
Sono-electrochemical reactors versus HPGR in nanotechnology; Chalcopyrite leaching
under microwave field and others.