Estudo do comportamento de uma polpa de concentrado de cobre: sedimentação em bancada

Abstract

The practice in workbench settling may be applied to calculate the size settling vessels, evaluate water clarification in different test conditions; evaluate miscellaneous pulp conditions of coagulation and flocculation; to develop and/or compare different types of polymers, establish optimum operational conditions, such as pH, solids percentage, flocculants dosage, etc., this makes the study of the thematic proposed relevant, because from the tests are necessary only small changes for the continuous thickeners project, ranging from small to industrial scale. Therefore, this work used a experimental methodology of workbench settling to study the settling curves of a copper concentrate pulp in different test conditions, varying the solids percentage and its granulometry. The experiments were conducted using copper concentrate, proceeding from a thickener feeding and supplied from the Copper Mill Process Laboratory of the Mina do Sossego (Vale S/A), at Canaã dos Carajás, PA, where the tests have also been made. The methodology applied in this work was based, at first, of a bibliography review about this theme, laboratory experiments, graphical treatment and analysis of the results. The workbench settling tests have been most efficient with the copper concentrate pulp. In concern to the variables studied, the results indicated that the higher the solid percentage, the lower will be the settling speed and that bigger sizes settles with a higher speed.