Professional Documents
Culture Documents
On-Line Diagnostic of Gold Leaching Parameters in A Laboratory
On-Line Diagnostic of Gold Leaching Parameters in A Laboratory
Preprint 04-64
ON-LINE DIAGNOSTIC OF GOLD LEACHING PARAMETERS
IN A LABORATORY SCALE SIMULATION OF A HEAP LEACH SYSTEM
M. G. Irish
M. J. Jahraus
Anglo Gold North America
Victor, CO
P. R. Taylor
E. E. Vidal
Colorado School of Mines
Golden, CO
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
Heap leaching was introduced by the USBM during the late
1960s as an alternative method for treating low grade ores in
Nevada. Since then, many improvements have been made in terms
of materials handling, understanding the cyanide/gold chemistry and
carbon adsorption process (Marsden et al, 1992; Wadsworth et al,
2000; Kirk et al, 1978). Work has also been done on modeling the
transport phenomena in heap leaching pads (Bouffard et al, 2001;
Bartlett, 1997; Sanchez-Chacon et al, 1997). But little work has been
done however in terms of measuring changes in leaching parameters
at a laboratory scale. Typical tests include ore mineralogy, bottle tests,
column leach tests, and pilot-scale leach tests (Yannopoulos, 1991).
These tests are extremely important when determining the feasibility
of gold leaching of a particular ore, but do not give fast results in
terms of parameter changes that may occur when different types of
ores or leaching solutions are used.
Work has been performed on developing industrial scale sensors for cyanide, pH and oxygen determination in leaching pads
(Vorster, 2001) which makes it an incentive to develop a small laboratory scale for fast ore leach tests that will allow predicting changes
at a large scale.
The ore used was ground using a laboratory scale roll mill. Ore
samples were reduced into smaller 1 kg samples by using standard
splitting procedures. The particle size distribution was obtained and is
shown in Table I. In each experiment the column of the reactor was
carefully loaded with 3,000 1 g of the ore. If the ore was to be
loaded with lime, it was previously mixed in small batches. The large
reservoir and smaller reservoirs for electrodes were filled with 1,200
1 ml of the cyanide solution. The solution chemistry was readjusted
depending on the experiment. The electrodes were placed in such a
ACID EXPERIMENTS
Retained, %
+4
-4+6
-6+12
-12+32
-32+150
-150+325
-325
11.68
15.44
19.95
26.23
15.94
7.55
3.21
Leaching Solution
Ore
01
02
03
1,200 ml Solution 00
1,200 ml Solution 01
450 ml of final Solution from Experiment 02 + 750 ml
of Solution 02 + 50 ml 0.01M NaOH
1,150 ml final Solution from Experiment 03 + 12 ml
0.01M NaOH + 30 ml 1M NaOH
3,000 g
3,000 g
04
pH
Solution
Solution
Solution
Solution
Solution
9.44
10.86
11.00
11.13
11.03
00
01
02
03
04
Gold, ppm
1.8
150
1.8
158
160
0.4
5.62
0.4
5.71
5.79
(a) Solutions 01 through 04 were prepared readjusting the original leaching Solution (00) with additions of NaOH, NaCN and AuCl3 in the required amounts.
Figure 4 shows the change of pH and gold concentration in solution to the amount of solution passed through the column. As in
Experiment 01 a sharp decrease in pH is observed in the early
stages. Even when the solution in 02 had a higher pH value (10.86)
compared to the pH of Solution 00 (9.44), it dropped to a minimum of
4.13 which then raised and stabilized to 4.57. Since the initial amount
of gold in solution was high, it is possible to see the change with the
amount of solution passed through the ore. It is clear that the gold
content drops as the solution passes through the column, going from
an initial value of 5.62 ppm down to 5.01 ppm. This reduction in gold
(1)
(2)
These two reactions compete throughout the experiment but initially the acid forming reaction dominates lowering the pH and dissolved oxygen until the sulfide source and available oxygen diminishes. Once this initial phase has occurred the carbonate decomposition
dominates, resulting in a slight increase of solution pH and dissolved
oxygen that equilibrates with oxygen from the gas phase.
Other reactions involving the precipitation of Au, and CN consumption must be occurring, but at the concentrations found in this
experiment their effect on the overall behavior is practically nil. It is
suspected that such a strong reduction in the pH and ORP values can
promote the dissociation of the gold complex ion, precipitating the
gold and generating HCN. The reactions would then be:
(3)
content suggests that at lower pH values, the gold cyanide complex
is no longer stable and the gold could be precipitating from solution
or the ore preg-robbing.
(4)
(5)
A gas sample was taken after 20 hours of started the experiment (5.5 ml sol./mg ore), and over 400 ppm of HCN was detected.
This high amount of HCN was expected since the solution was
already acid and the cyanide is no longer stable in solution. Other
gases were analyzed, finding no traces of NO2 or NH3. The O2 concentration was found to be 20%. By the end of the experiment, the
levels of HCN had dropped down to 280 ppm.
Since the values of gold and cyanide concentration were too low
to draw any conclusion, a second experiment was performed, namely Experiment 02. In this experiment the same conditions were used
as in Experiment 01 except for the solution being adjusted with gold
and cyanide additions.
REFERENCES
Bartlett, R.W., 1997, Metal Extraction from Ores by Heap
Leaching, Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B, Vol. 28B, Aug.,
pp. 529-545.
Sanchez, A.E. and Lapidus, G.T., 1997, Model for heap leaching of gold ores by cyanidation, Hydrometallurgy, Vol. 44, pp. 1-20.
Vorster, B.J., Cyanide Control in the Metallurgical Process of
Gold Extraction in Anglogold (S.A.), Cyanide: Social , Industrial and
Economic Aspects, C.Young, ed., TMS, Warrendale, PA, pp. 535-547.
Wadsworth, M.E., Zhu, X., Thompson, J.S. and Pereira, C.J.,
2000, Gold dissolution and activation in cyanide solution: kinetics
and mechanism, Hydrometallurgy, Vol. 57, pp. 1-11.