JPH11319634A - Recovering method of valuable metal from cobalt enriched crust - Google Patents

Abstract

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To recover a valuable noble metal by ore floatation by pulverizing a cobalt enriched cost to prepare a slurry, adding a foaming agent and a collector to rough, recovering the roughed precipitation as the useful part and further recovering the selected precipitation as a useful part. SOLUTION: A cobalt enriched crust ore is pulverized with a gangue part up to <= about 6 mesh under in the whole quantity with a crusher (S1, S2) and is ground with the addition of artificial sea water by a ball mill. The pulp after ground is charged to a cell for floatation and conditioned (S3) with the addition of the foaming agent and the synthetic sulfonic acid collector, roughed (S4) to be separated into a floated part and a precipitated part to recover (S5, S6) as the useful part. After that, the roughed and floated pulp is conditioned (S7, S8) with the addition of sodium silicate, selected (S9) to recover (S10, S6) the precipitated part as the useful part and the floated part is made tailing (S11, S12).

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

[0001]

The present invention relates to a method for recovering valuable metals such as cobalt, nickel and copper from a cobalt-rich crust by flotation.

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art Marine bottom mineral resources such as cobalt-rich crust and manganese nodule have been actively explored since the 1970s, but minerals used for commercial production up to the present. Resources have not been reached. Above all, cobalt-rich crust is promising in that it is present in shallower places than manganese nodules and rich in the rare element cobalt.

[0003] However, while the manganese nodules are present in a nodular form, most of the useful parts of the cobalt-rich crust, except for a part, adhere to the surface of the relatively flat basement rock in a shell-like manner. Exist in shape. For this reason, it is difficult to selectively mine only useful shell-shaped parts using the mining methods currently considered, and it is expected that basement rocks, which will be gangue, will be mixed to some extent, and the volume will increase accordingly. As a result, the grade of the useful metal component is reduced. Furthermore, regarding the nodular cobalt-rich crust that is present in some parts, the valuable metal is contained in the shell part of the surface layer, and the core part that becomes gangue other than the shell part is larger than the manganese nodule, From this point, it is considered that the mixing ratio of gangue increases.

[0004]

Therefore, in the case where the ore ore is used as a smelting raw material as it is, a large-scale production apparatus is required due to the mixing of gangue, and a rise in operating costs is expected.
Therefore, in commercial production, on a mining ship, cobalt-rich crust ore unloaded from the ocean floor,
It is considered effective to reduce smelting costs and transportation costs to on-site smelting facilities by removing gangue containing no valuable metal components by some sort of sorting method. However, although various methods have been proposed to date for this selection method, they have not yet been established.

Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide a method for recovering valuable precious metals such as cobalt, nickel and copper from a cobalt-rich crust by flotation.

[0006]

In order to achieve the above-mentioned object, a method of the present invention is to pulverize a cobalt-rich crust containing valuable metals such as cobalt, nickel, and copper, which are mined from the seabed together with gangue. , After slurrying, a polyglycol ester-based water-soluble foaming agent and a scavenger are added to carry out rough selection, and the rough sedimentation is collected as a useful part, and the fine sedimentation is collected as a useful part. Is a method of separating cobalt rich crust and gangue, that is, a method of recovering valuable metals. In the present invention, it is preferable to use a synthetic sulfonate or sodium oleate as the collecting agent.

[0007]

BEST MODE FOR CARRYING OUT THE INVENTION In the present invention, first, a cobalt-rich crust is pulverized to about 100 μm with a particle diameter of 80% using a commonly used crusher, mill or the like, and then the pulp concentration is reduced to 40 to 50%. Adjust so that

Next, an appropriate amount of a synthetic sulfonate or sodium oleate as a collecting agent and an appropriate amount of a water-soluble polyglycol ester-based foaming agent as a foaming agent are added to the pulp, and flotation as coarse screening is performed. The part is collected first as a useful part.

Further, sodium silicate is added as a suppressor to the flotation in the rough screening to carry out the fine screening, and the fine sedimentation part is recovered as a useful part.

[0010] Under the two flotation conditions of the present invention, the shell-like portion containing useful minerals is both concentrated in the sedimentation part, the coarse sedimentation and the fine sedimentation. On the other hand, the gangue to be removed is
It is concentrated in well-selected flotation.

The main useful components in the cobalt-rich crust are platinum, rhodium, in addition to cobalt, nickel and copper. Most of these are contained in a solid solution state in the shell-like portion. Therefore, it is practically impossible to separate useful components from manganese oxide and iron oxide constituting the shell-like portion by physical sorting.

The cobalt-rich crust is composed of a shell-like portion and a gangue portion. In particular, in the case of a nodular cobalt-rich crust, the gangue is composed of a mineral mainly composed of apatite.

As a result of the inventors' research, in such a case,
In flotation using synthetic sulfonic acid or sodium oleate as a scavenger, gangue was found to float more easily than the shell, and the addition of sodium silicate suppressed the floating of the shell. This is to take advantage of the property that is caused.

As described above, in the present invention, the conditions of the reverse flotation for suspending gangue are settled, and the shell-like portion suspended along with the gangue in the roughing is sedimented with sodium silicate by selective screening.

[0015]

(Embodiment 1) Embodiment 1 of the present invention will be described with reference to the flowchart shown in FIG. After crushing the cobalt-rich crust ore obtained from the Pacific Ocean bottom together with the gangue part by a crusher until the total amount becomes under a 6-mesh sieve (Step S1, Step S2), 250 g is weighed,
250 cc of artificial seawater was added, and the mixture was ground by a ball mill to a particle diameter of 80% by weight to 100 μm or less.

The pulp after grinding is put into a flotation cell,
"AE" manufactured by Cytec as a foaming agent per ore weight
ROFROTH65 ”is 128g / ton. As a synthetic sulfonate scavenger,“ AEROPROMOT ”
OR845 ″ was added at 1500 g / ton, conditioning was performed for 3 minutes (step S3), then rough selection was performed for 10 minutes (step S4), the sediment was separated into a flotation part and a sedimentation part, and the sedimentation part was collected as a useful part. (Step S5, Step S
6).

Thereafter, sodium silicate is added to the pulp of the rough flotation at 2500 g / ton and conditioning is performed for 3 minutes (steps S7 and S8), and the pulp is finely filtered for 5 minutes (step S9). It was collected (Step S10, Step S6), and the flotation was used as tailing (Step S11, Step S12). Table 1 shows the results of the above processing.

According to Table 1, a cobalt-rich crust ore containing 0.40% of cobalt, 0.39% of nickel, and 0.06% of copper was subjected to flotation treatment, and the actual yield was 79.96% for cobalt and 79.96% for nickel, respectively. : 80.13%, copper: 8
A product with a yield of 57.41% was obtained with a yield of 0.18%.

(Second Embodiment) The flow of the flow in the second embodiment is almost the same as that in the first embodiment. Similar to Example 1, the cobalt-rich crust ore obtained from the Pacific Ocean bottom was pulverized with a crusher (Step S1, Step S2), and then 100 μm in 80% weight particle diameter with a ball mill.
m or less.

The ground pulp is put into a flotation cell,
"AE" manufactured by Cytec as a foaming agent per weight of ore
ROFROTTH 65 ″ was added at 128 g / ton, and sodium oleate was added at 1500 g / ton as a collecting agent.
After performing conditioning for one minute (step S3), rough selection is started, and three minutes later, "AERFROTH65" is changed to 128.
g / ton, 1500 g / to sodium oleate
n, and the rough selection was continued. After 6 minutes, “AERF” was further added.
ROTH65 "was added at 128 g / ton and continued,
Rough selection was performed for 10 minutes from the start of the rough selection (step S4), and the sedimentation part was collected as a useful part (step S5, step S6).

Thereafter, sodium silicate is added to the pulp of the coarse flotation (step S7) at 2500 g / ton, conditioning is performed for 3 minutes (step S8), and then, fine selection is performed for 5 minutes (step S9), and the sedimentation part is recovered. (Step S10,
Step S6) The tailings were used as the flotation part (Step S1).
1. Step S12). Table 2 shows the results of the above processing.

According to Table 2, a cobalt-rich crust ore containing 0.40% of cobalt, 0.38% of nickel and 0.07% of copper was subjected to flotation treatment to obtain actual yields of 87.44% cobalt and 87% nickel, respectively. 0.02%, copper 85.4
A product with a yield of 64.4% was obtained with a yield of 6%.

[0023]

As described above, according to the method of the present invention, by removing gangue, a valuable metal can be recovered from a cobalt-rich crust ore at low cost without requiring a large-scale smelting apparatus. .

[Table 1]

[Table 2]

[Brief description of the drawings]

FIG. 1 is a flowchart showing a flow of steps of a collection method.

[Explanation of symbols]

 S1 to S12 Each step in the recovery method

Claims (4)

[Claims] 1. A cobalt-rich crust containing valuable metals such as cobalt, nickel and copper is pulverized into a slurry, and then a foaming agent and a collecting agent are added to carry out a rough selection, and a rough sedimentation is useful. A method for recovering valuable metals from a cobalt-rich crust, characterized in that a selective inhibitor is added to a coarse flotation and a selective purification is performed, and the selective sedimentation is recovered as a useful part. 2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the inhibitor is sodium silicate. 3. The method for recovering valuable metals according to claim 1, wherein the collecting agent is a synthetic sulfonate. 4. The method according to claim 1, wherein the collecting agent is sodium oleate.