Abstract
Pre-concentration opportunities are available for most operations to improve the grade of their mill feed and eliminate fine/soft contaminants or coarse/ hard material. As an industry, we are obliged to ensure our plant feed requires the lowest power and water consumption and the smallest footprint tailing-management facility. Every opportunity to reject waste when it’s still coarse, dry and conveyable should be assessed. So here’s the dilemma: we cannot include pre-concentration stages in flowsheet design without some level of demonstration and yet, we never get the opportunity. For a greenfield project, we cannot evaluate pre-concentration due to a lack of standardized testing methods and sample top-size constraints. It’s exacerbated by our current testing practices where sample preparation involves stage-crushing down to a manageable size – destroying the opportunity to evaluate coarse beneficiation methods.
This paper covers recent progress by the author to develop a standardized ranking test using ½ drill core samples. The objective is to allow companies to more easily consider pre-concentration at an early study stage and provide more useful data to quantify the impact on project economics.
