Flotation Tests of Poor Copper and Cobalt Tailings from Dike 3 of Kipushi

Current technological developments are pushing companies to recover waste and recycle refuse. With this in mind, the treatment of waste from dam 3 represents a significant opportunity to recover the metals contained in this waste and thus maximise the use of these resources.This recovery is achieved by increasing the content of recoverable metals in the tailings, based on a characterisation of our sample, which leads us to choose a concentration technique that is slightly more suitable for this type of tailings. Having chosen froth flotation as the technique, the first part of the experiment focused on characterising the sample through mineralogical analysis, chemical analysis and granulochemical analysis. The results showed that total copper is at 0.94% and oxide at 0.85%. The main mineral is malachite, with traces of chrysocolla. The gangue consists of quartz, iron oxides, pyrite and dolomite; it is therefore dolomitic in terms of the Cutotal/CaOsoluble ratio.The reject is crushed to a D70 of 75 microns in 20 minutes. The second part focused on laboratory flotation tests, with reagent doses such as NaHS and KAX maintained at 3000 g/t and 300 g/t for a recovery yield of 44.8% with a concentrate of 1.11%.We realised that the sulphide portion could be minimised to perform mixed flotation, so we moved on to oxide flotation by sulphurisation, where we varied the doses of all our reagents and obtained the following best doses.  NaHS and KAX: 500g/t and 50g/t, with an estimated content of 1.12%;  mixture: 200g/t, with a rough grade of 1.27%;  silicate: 100g/t, with a rough grade of 1.17%. These results simply show that the initial goal could not be achieved, but with this we can try to feed the leaching reject.