The Palabora copper mine in South Africa is one of the largest copper mines in the world. Copper production process in palabora mine south africa operates in accordance with the guidelines of the company, structured on human rights, corporate governance, environmental management, corporate citizenship and business ethics - as it is consistent with regulatory requirements, relevant and leading industry practices. The guidelines in this Palabora mining defined, approved and supervised by the company's board of directors. Palabora mine seeks to implement both the letter and the spirit of these guidelines for all areas of business.
Subsurface mining activities in Palabora copper mine continue as planned The use of modern communication technologies open on southern Africa Palabora mining operations have resulted in huge cost savings in installation, hardware and engineering. In addition, many of the benefits derived from the functional advantages of digital communication. For example, all the diagnostic data can now be transferred directly from the field into the control room of mining operations. This increases reliability and significantly reduce plant downtime. Extensive diagnostic functions enable preventative maintenance and service work coordinated. A particular advantage is that the operation and configuration of field devices from different manufacturers in a network Profibus-PA can be done over the network with a single engineering tool (Commuwin from Endress and Hauser).
Subsurface mining activities in Palabora copper mine continue as planned The use of modern communication technologies open on southern Africa Palabora mining operations have resulted in huge cost savings in installation, hardware and engineering. In addition, many of the benefits derived from the functional advantages of digital communication. For example, all the diagnostic data can now be transferred directly from the field into the control room of mining operations. This increases reliability and significantly reduce plant downtime. Extensive diagnostic functions enable preventative maintenance and service work coordinated. A particular advantage is that the operation and configuration of field devices from different manufacturers in a network Profibus-PA can be done over the network with a single engineering tool (Commuwin from Endress and Hauser).
Copper production process in palabora mine south africa Since 2003 ,
use two flotation plants for to copper production process from the
autogenous mills in series to boost recovery from higher grade
underground ore. Slurry that has not arrived at the final froth
concentrate forms the feed to the magnetic separation plant. Transition
to underground mining at the mine Palabora has allowed 50,000 tpd of
conventional crushing, grinding and flotation capacity. Copper and
magnetite recovered on behalf of Foskor (neighboring mining company) by
toll processing 20,000 tpd of marginal ore stock of mining operations in
the open Palabora. The conventional process route is also applied to
underground ore available in excess of autogenous milling capacity.
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Copper production process in palabora mine south africa through stages mineral ore from the mine underground block-cave - less than 300mm in size - are sent to the stock into two,the process separately, then rock mineral crushed into the rock mineral grinding circuits. These in turn, each comprise a 9.75 meter-diameter tumbling mill rotated by 2 x 3.5 MW drives. Large rocks impact, scrub and attrition against each other, reducing their size, which results in the liberation of the copper sulphides.
Inside the mill mineral ore was loaded into vibrating screen to produce mineral rock which will be processed into the crusher machine. Fine particles of 0.3mm removed from the circuit as the main product from the mill to 30,000Tpd (tonnes per day?) Cyclone rough below the product stream is also recycled. Cyclone overflow from a second 1.5 kilometer circuit is then pumped into the secondary grinding mill (SMP) where the soil mineral ore refined to be less than 0.15mm, using parallel steel balls up to five 1.2 MW in the milling circuit.
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Material mineral ore crushed in the primary crusher machine, whose function is to reduce the size of the dump material up to 200mm to 1500mm material down before the copper minerals are processed into one of two stock. Feeders and conveyors transport the ore to a two-stage dry crushing plant where two secondary crushers reduce the size to below 50mm. Additionally, 5 tertiary crushers further reduce the ore to below 20mm, operating in closed circuit with vibrating screens. Crushing plant product is then conveyed 1.4 kilometres to fill any one of six fine ore bins, each one feeding six rod mill flotation sections, all operating in parallel. Certain sections are used for wet grinding marginal ore to below 0.3mm, followed by a copper flotation process similar to that used for the underground ore. Concentrate is pumped to the dewatering plant, while magnetite is removed from the tailings before thickening and pumping final product to Foskor for phosphate flotation.
In the copper ore processing , chemicals are added to allow the copper sulfide particles to separate from the fine ore particles through the process of 'froth flotation copper' xanthate additions under mush and adsorbs to the particles to the copper sulfide to increase their hydrophobicity. Frother also added to produce a stable froth. The flow is then divided between the parallel rows of flotation cells. Each row contains several agitator to maintain the suspension and to disperse air into the slurry. Then the air bubbles rise to the surface of the cell, hydrophobic copper mineral particles transported into bubbles and form a stable foam, which continues to overflow into launders. The process is then repeated twice more to copper recovery process almost 90% of the feed copper into only 2% of the feed weight to produce a 32% copper sulphide concentrate. The latter is then pumped to the dewatering plant.
Concentrate slurry is then pumped into the thickener using a vacuum filter disc and rotary dryers coal whose function is to remove the water in the copper concentrate up to 8% residual moisture. Dryer product is weighed by a belt scale and sampled before it is conveyed to the smelter receiving shed.
Concentrate slurry is then pumped into the thickener using a vacuum filter disc and rotary dryers coal whose function is to remove the water in the copper concentrate up to 8% residual moisture. Dryer product is weighed by a belt scale and sampled before it is conveyed to the smelter receiving shed. Results of flotation tailings from both autogenous circuit and then pumped into the conventional magnetic separation plant, in which a rotating drum magnet to extract magnetite weight of the slurry. Nine triple drum magnets are used for three stages of upgrading to produce up to 5000 Tpd of 98% pure magnetite concentrate. The concentrate is separated into two sizes by a rising current of water (elutriation). On average, 600 Tpd of magnetite fines are directed to classifier overflow, which is thickened, filtered and stockpiled prior shipping it to domestic heavy media consumers who use it for upgrading coal. The majority of the magnetite is transported to a classifier underflow and is then pumped either to drying paddocks for railing and export, or to large magnetite storage dams, depending on sales commitments. Export magnetite is used for the production of iron and steel.
After the process of removing magnetite, results of underground ore tailings flowed into three parallel diameter of 90 meters, the tailings thickener to recover and reuse water, while the combined underflows pumped to various points around the perimeter of a large tailings dams. The dam wall is maintained at a higher level by a beach of coarse solids. Fines flow to the central pond, where clear water is decanted by a siphon and stored in a return water dam for reuse in the process.
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