Industry news

1. Overview The resource crisis has become the most important issue in today's world. Therefore, resource recycling is more important at all times. People are also demanding higher and higher efficiency of resource recovery from natural and industrial wastewater. With the increase in the demand for contracted metals and the decline in ore grades, as metal resources are on the verge of exhaustion, the development of efficient methods for processing ore is an important topic in the world, and hydrometallurgy will continue to provide this new method of processing ore.　　 Flotation is a material separation method using bubbles as a medium. For a long time, flotation has been used to separate minerals. But in recent years, flotation is not only used to separate minerals, but also to separate various solid substances, and even to separate solvents in solutions, so the use of flotation is very extensive [1].　　 Flotation reagents, surfactants used as collectors, have made considerable progress in recent years in research and development and practical applications. Recently, people have begun to direct their attention to ion flotation, solvent extraction, which is a highly efficient method for recovering metals. Many researches have been conducted on the flotation of metal ions using ionic surfactants, including removing harmful metal ions in factory drainage, or separating radioactive materials from atomic reactors, and recovering valuable metal ions.

2. Mineral flotation 　　 mineral flotation is the enrichment process of flotation of minerals from the slurry by using the difference in the hydrophobicity of minerals in the beneficiation method, which is called flotation or flotation for short. In the flotation process, the ore of the mill is treated with some organic or inorganic chemicals, and is stirred and aerated in the slurry. The minerals that are easy to adhere to the bubbles float up with the bubbles, and the minerals that do not adhere to the bubbles remain in the slurry. To achieve the purpose of separation and enrichment of useful minerals.　　 Flotation process is a complex physical and chemical process, and its theoretical basis is directly based on surface chemistry, colloidal chemistry, crystallography and physics. The flotation reagent is a kind of marginal science established between flotation and basic organic chemistry. Since the 20th century, it can be seen from the development process of flotation reagents in the world that many flotation reagents are often closely related to analytical chemistry, and they are often the first to be used in analytical reagents. It is already an effective metal ion quantitative reagent in analytical chemistry, and then it is used as a flotation reagent in flotation beneficiation.　 　　 3. Flotation reagents 　　 Various reagents used in the flotation process are collectively referred to as flotation reagents. Many flotation agents are organic compounds, many of which are surfactants. Flotation agents can be divided into three categories according to their main purposes, namely foaming agents, collectors and regulators (including activators and inhibitors).　　 The history of using surfactants in organic minerals is very long, and in fact, it is now widely used and developed.　　 The application range of surfactants in the mining industry includes a wide range of applications such as mineral processing, mine safety, fire prevention, dust suppression, heavy liquid stabilizers or coagulants in coal preparation, and ore surface treatment agents [2].　　 According to recent statistics, non-ionic surfactants accounted for 50% of surfactants used in mining, followed by cationic surfactants at 30%, and anionic surfactants at 10%. One of the most widely used is flotation