In recent years, with the rapid development of the global new energy industry, the demand for cobalt is increasing, which greatly exceeds the supply of cobalt. Therefore, how to improve the production of cobalt is a huge problem in modern society. In most cases, cobalt always exists at the form of associated minerals, among which copper-cobalt ores is the main source of cobalt.

In practical applications, flotation is the common method to separate cobalt from copper-cobalt ore enrichment. However, copper-cobalt ores are characterized by complex composition, fine dissemination particle size, easy slime, high content of harmful impurities and poor floatability. It’s difficult for the recovery rate to reach more than 60%, which causes a large amount of resource waste and a high cost of beneficiation. Because cobalt contains weak magnetism, and some of them are distributed in magnetic minerals such as iron ore at the form of isomorphism or mechanical inclusions in copper-cobalt ore, it’s feasible to adapt magnetic separation to recycle valuable copper-cobalt elements.

Based on this, SLon developed a new processing technology of flotation combined with magnetic separation, to recover copper and cobalt from flotation tailings. First of all, in view of the problem that the use of a large number of agents in the front end of the flotation process will lead to the blockage of the medium box, we optimized the design of the separation area to solve it. Secondly, for the flotation reagent corrosion problem, we have also made lots of improvements in the material, design, electrochemical corrosion and other aspects of HGMS to overcome the problem of corrosion resistance in the complex agent environment.

The new floating – magnetic combined technology has the advantages of short flow, low energy consumption, high grade and high yield. Some copper and cobalt mines in Africa have demonstrated that the updated Copper-cobalt HGMS, associated with the “flotation followed by magnetic” beneficiation process, can highly increase the recovery of copper and cobalt metals by 5%-10%. The implementation of the new process not only ensures the beneficiation index, but also greatly reduces the cost of beneficiation, which improves the comprehensive utilization rate of resources, and brings huge economic and social benefits for enterprises.