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Gold/Mining/Energy : ECHARTERS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Charters who wrote (2523)	4/6/1998 10:31:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3744

I suspect detergents swamp the effect. With flotation you are carefully making a molecule that is a little bit sticky to the mineral and also wants to form a film(bubbles), so you need a good frother and a weak surface 'active' agent. It all has to do with a property called the surface energy and the drop angle that water makes with the surfactant. Too good a wetting and the dirt of all kinds is wetted and sinks. With the right amount you get some wetted and some not. The unwetted is what you collect on the bubbles, while the silica etc sinks. If you take pure silica and pure sulphide as a flat crystal and place a small drop of pure water on the surface it will spread under its own weight and will form an angle. water on an oily surface will form a round bead, and on pure clean silica will spread and wet it(like you car windshield after it has rained long enough for the grease to go away and the glass to 'wet') Sulphide will not 'wet' If you then take a molecule that does stick to sulfide and does like to froth and bubble it through ground up rock it will form a froth and the surface active agent will coat all the surfaces of the bubbles and the sulfide will stick there. The effect was first seen with washing miners clothes with not enough soap, and that gave a weakly actvie surfactant. They the optimised it and cheapified it. Akin to it is the grease table Bill