Grant: Engage Grants Program

Froth flotation is a process for separating valuable minerals from ore. Surface active collector chemicalsisolate minerals and metal species from multicomponent process mixtures in the flotation process. Thecollector chemicals most commonly used in the flotation of sulfide minerals and gold are xanthates such aspotassium amyl xanthate (PAX). The objectives of the project are testing the potassium amyl xanthate (PAX)that New Afton Mine (New Gold Inc.) receives from suppliers to help understand the quality and anyinterferences in analysis; understand the residual PAX in the system and degradation products that will help toimprove the use of PAX in the circuit; understand the rate of decomposition of the PAX when it is in the pelletform. This project will focus on the quality of the material using xanthate activity analysis, metal and sulphuranalysis, as well as differentiation of the types of xanthate. It will also look at trying to identify potentialimpurities in the xanthate as an effort to outline testing that could be done to validate the quality of the product.This project will compare qualities of xanthate between anonymous suppliers and provide a summary of theeffectiveness of the current quality testing scheme for xanthates. The project will also include the study ofdegradation rates for xanthates in the mill circuit and xanthates in the pellet form. Significant effort will beundertaken to provide a method of analysis that will be inexpensive and quick but will ensure that the specifiedquality of xanthate has been met. The current analytical methods (electrochemistry, spectrophotometry andchromatography) for analyzing xanthates and other flotation collectors suffer disadvantages such as irreversibledestruction of the column with chromatography and also derivatization of compounds is needed before thevarious analyses. Therefore, this project will develop a rapid, robust and sensitive capillary electrophoresis(CE) for separating and determining xanthates in mining waters. CE has several advantages over the currentlyused methods including faster analysis time, higher efficiency, smaller reagent consumption, and easierautomation.