Efficacy of sustainable polymers to mitigate the negative effects of anisotropic clay minerals in flotation and dewatering operations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The depletion of high-grade ore resources and ongoing demand for mineral products has led to an increase in the exploitation of low-grade and complex ores, which often contain colloid clay particles (e.g., kaolinite) that are detrimental to flotation and dewatering unit operations in mineral processing. During flotation, clay particles increase the pulp viscosity and produce a slime coating by adsorption on the surface of valuable minerals resulting in the reduction of the flotation grade and recovery. Clay particles are also suspended in mine tailings that can cause dewatering challenges in flocculation operations. The clay mitigation strategies employed during flotation (dilution and use of dispersants) and dewatering (addition of flocculants) involve reagents from non-renewable sources that can have deleterious consequences on the environment and aquatic biota. As part of an effort to find environmentally benign reagents, we evaluated the performance of six sustainable polymers (protein- and polysaccharide-based biopolymers) for their potential as dispersants and flocculants of kaolinite clay particles. Their effectiveness was assessed via chalcopyrite froth flotation, settling, and turbidity tests. Zeta potential, adsorption isotherm by total organic carbon, and X-ray scattering tests were also conducted to understand the interactions between biopolymers and kaolinite mineral surfaces. At pH 7 and 10, the anionic polysaccharide pectin showed promising dispersant efficiency in flotation and the cationic protein protamine significantly improved kaolinite flocculation in dewatering operation. Outcomes of this investigation demonstrate that commercially available sustainable polymers or “biopolymers” have a significant potential to use to mitigate the negative effects of clay particles in minerals processing to reduce environmental issues arising from inorganic and synthetic organic reagents from non-renewable sources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".