Characterization and recovery of gravity-recoverable platinum group minerals

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Many platinum group minerals (PGMs)have a high density and accumulate in grinding circuits, even at fine size (25 µm).  These are gravity-recoverable PGMs, or GRPGMs.  They risk either overgrinding and/or surface ageing, both resulting in a loss of efficiency in the downstream flotation circuit, where they should normally be recovered.  The present proposal aims at characterizing the PGMs, understanding their behaviour better, eventually to model their recovery from the grinding circulating loads by centrifuge or flash flotation recovery.  The effort will focus on the Sudbury basin, where GRPGMs are abundant and known to display the above behaviour.  Efforts of a previous discovery grants were aimed at characterization and study of their deportment in grinding circuit.  The present effort will complete the characterization work and focus on actual recovery.  Bench and pilot scale test work will focus on grinding kinetcis, floatability and response to centrifuge separation.