It is essential to optimise conditions for adsorption of gold leached from an ore onto activated carbon in a CIL process. While history has demonstrated this process to overall be a robust chemical process where fluctuations in the composition of the leach slurry has limited influence on the gold recovery, there is a continuous concern about the effect of additional chemicals added prior to, or in the CIL process. Flocculants may be added to a mill discharge to increase the solids content of the slurry entering the CIL process, dispersants may be added to reduce the viscosity of the thickened slurry. The motivation for both is generally to increase the plant throughput. Crucial in this aspect is that the viscosity modifiers must not influence the gold adsorption capacity of the activated carbon used. In this work the fraction adsorbed gold is determined in the presence of typical concentrations of viscosity modifiers in a model slurry. Effects of dosage and contact time between gold and carbon are explored and in-line with earlier research, it is found that these process chemicals have no impact on the gold adsorption capacity.
CITATION:Lauten, R A, 2019. Gold adsorption onto activated carbon in the presence of viscosity modifiers, in Proceedings World Gold 2019, pp 717723 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).