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Today, with the ever-increasing concerns about the widespread environmental impact of the mining industry, the movement of the mineral processing sectors, which heavily rely on various chemical and petroleum-origin reagents, to the green industry is imperative. Due to the advantages biotechnological approaches provide, bioprocessing is considered a benign alternative to conventional mineral processing techniques. Recent fundamental research works have directed the attention to the development of biotechnology and using microorganisms in the new field of biobeneficiation, especially bioflotation. The current review categorizes bioflotation methods into direct and indirect processes giving an in-depth insight into their concepts. Furthermore, this study provides a comprehensive review of research on different aspects of bioflotation, such as the effects of operating (mainly solid content and pH) and biotechnological parameters, potential mechanisms, and unexplored points, but from different, and practical viewpoints. Recent studies were summarized by categorizing microorganisms based on their wall structures, and growth temperature. It was disclosed based on the literature data that the nutritional requirement of variant microorganisms was only chemolithotroph. Further, the conducted researches in investigating optimum conditions for maximization of contact angle and adhesion forces to reach the maximum recovery were reviewed. In addition, existing problems and challenges of this field were investigated and it was found that economic barriers and obscurities were the main obstacles of industrial application in mining and mineral processing industries. Finally, new perspectives and suggestions were presented to shed light on future research and help to solve the challenges currently facing its application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many reagents are used as frother in flotation process, however, a general reference for their identification and characterization is not available. The present work categorizes the commonly used frothers and evaluates the available methodologies to determine their properties. In this paper, frothers properties such as molecular weight, viscosity, boiling and freezing point, hydrophile-lipophile balance number, solubility, surface activity and critical micelle concentration were discussed. The commonly used measurement methods for froth structure and dynamic and static frothability were also presented along with water recovery index and critical coalescence concentration (CCC). Results showed that the practical identification of frothers properties has not been thoroughly evaluated and therefore, there is a need for developing novel and easy-to-apply experimental methods in this area. For example, it was found that there is no promising single process to measure the CCC value. This review revealed that the 2D froth structure measurement methods are associated with a considerable bias, while 3D techniques can effectively represent the actual froth properties. It was also found that the potential interactions between various frothers properties and how they can influence the flotation performance in an industrial environment are not yet understood and needs further investigation. It was also identified that there is no standard instruction to provide a reliable connection between both manufactures and frothers consumers. In our opinion, the current review paves the path for the elaboration of knowledge and technology to provide promising methods for determining conventionally used and complex frothers properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research work introduces a novel hybrid geometallurgical approach to develop a deep and comprehensive relationship between geological and mining characteristics with metallurgical parameters in a mineral processing plant. This technique involves statistically screening mineralogical and operational parameters using the Historical Data (HD) method. Further, it creates an intelligent bridge between effective parameters and metallurgical responses by the Deep Learning (DL) simulation method. In the HD method, the time and cost of common approaches in geometallurgical studies were minimized through the use of available archived data. Then, the generated DL-based predictive model was enabled to accurately forecast the process behavior in the mineral processing units. The efficiency of the proposed method for a copper ore sample was practically evaluated. For this purpose, six representative samples from different active mining zone were collected and used for flotation tests organized using a randomizing code. The experimental results were then statistically analyzed using HD method to assess the significance of mineralogical and operational parameters, including the proportions of effective minerals, particle size, collector and frother concentration, solid content and pH. Based on the HD analysis, the metallurgical responses including the copper grade and recovery, copper kinetics constant and iron grade in concentrate were modeled with an accuracy of about 90%. Next, the geometallurgical model of the process was developed using the long short-term memory neural network (LSTM) algorithm. The results showed that the studied metallurgical responses could be predicted with more than 95% accuracy. The results of this study showed that the hybrid geometallurgy approach can be used as a promising tool to achieve a reliable relationship between the mining and mineral processing sectors, and sustainable and predictable production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]