Solid/liquid separation
Mineral processing techniques often implement wet operations where the material is processed in the form of slurry. It is necessary to separate the liquid and solid phases at different stages or at the end of processing.
This operation is performed in two stages:
- Thickening, which uses settling tanks and clarifiers (circular, lamellar, lagoon, etc.), with or without flocculation/coagulation, and which enable solid matter to be concentrated using gravity in a much denser phase than the initial slurry, with an initial separation of the liquid phase.
- Filtration, which uses the forced passage of the liquid phase through a porous element (clothes) which holds the solids, or by pressure (filter press), or by vacuum suction (belt or drum filter).
Supplementary techniques meet the needs of more specific scenarios such as the centrifugation of ultra-fine materials.
In terms of thickening, CTP is able to perform laboratory studies on the settling parameters of a slurry (sedimentation curve, Talmage and Fitch method) as well as the selection of the most appropriate flocculating agents, sometimes alongside manufacturers. With regard to filtration, CTP has laboratory filters with which it can also study essential parameters such as filtration time, filtering capacity, etc.
At pilot level, CTP has presses filter, vacuum belt filters and vacuum drum filters of various dimensions and capacities. This equipment can be tested depending on the characteristics of the material, and the intended applications and objectives.
Equipment | Number of plates (max.) | Filtration surface (mm x mm by plate) | Maximum pressure (bar) |
Press filter (Matec) | 30 | 800 x 800 | 10 |
Press filter (Withus) | 12 | 600 x 600 | 10 |
Belt filter (Pannevis) | - | 0.10 m² | vacuum |
Belt filter (Philippe) | - | 0.50 m² | vacuum |
Drum filter (Dorr-Oliver) | - |
| vacuum |
