Home – Home – Jornals – Journal of Mining Sciences 2026 number 3

In an effort to address the challenges related to the quality of the zinc concentrate and the recovery of zinc in this product, a modification of the zinc mineral flotation flowsheet was implemented in the industrial processing plant. The flotation scheme for zinc minerals, previously operated in the so-called “closed circuit” (where the intermediate product M1 was recycled to the beginning of the rougher flotation stage), was converted to an open circuit configuration. In this modified scheme, the tailings from the rougher flotation stage and the cleaning stage are combined and discharged as final tailings. Following this modification, a detailed survey of the technological process in the industrial plant was conducted. In addition, mineralogical and chemical analyses were performed on the copper circuit tailings (feed to the zinc circuit), zinc concentrate, rougher flotation tailings, cleaning flotation tailings from the separation of zinc minerals and pyrite, and the final tailings. Subsequently, additional cleaning experiments of the zinc concentrate were conducted to evaluate whether flotation performance could be improved by introducing an additional cleaning stage. The influence of cleaning time and pulp density during the cleaning process was examined without the use of flotation reagents, except for a pH regulator and a frother. The experiments were carried out on zinc concentrate samples collected from the flotation plant.