Small-scale fluidised bed flotation device for ore amenability testing

Fluidised bed flotation, such as with Eriez's HydroFloat (R), has demonstrated the ability to recover coarse particles up to 600 mu m in size during sulphide flotation. The ability to perform flotation at coarse particle sizes provides significant benefits to the minerals processing industry, including energy savings in comminution and increased plant throughput. However, the smallest available fluidised bed flotation units require between 15 and 20 kg of sample for a single test and upwards of 100 kg of sample to conduct initial scoping studies for new ore feed material. This high sample requirement often prohibits the execution of small-scale flotation optimisation tests using this technology. The development of a small-scale fluidised bed flotation device is therefore vital to enable rapid and efficient testing for essential operations such as ore amenability and geometallurgical evaluation, circuit modelling and design, and routine metallurgical assessment. This work presents the design and development of a small-scale fluidised bed flotation device that uses 1-2 kg of sample per test. The work further outlines the testing methodology to achieve both reasonable and reproducible flotation results. Both the device and test methodology were demonstrated using two copper ore samples, and the flotation results generated were similar in form to laboratory batch testing using conventional flotation cells.