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Developments in gold recovery equipment and their use in Greece

Manoutsoglou Emmanouil, Stamboliadis, Elias, Pantelaki ,O

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Summary

Gravity separation techniques were used in theearly years to extract native metal nuggets andflakes from placer gold deposits. This wasrelatively easy for visible metal grains. As thesize of the grain becomes smaller traditionalgravity separation techniques becomeinadequate to recover native gold. Cyanidationwas invented as a solution to the problem.According to it, gold and other precious metalsare dissolved in water by sodium cyanide. Theresult was a drastic increase of world goldproduction but at the same time environmentalissues were raised. In Greece gold mining hasbecome equivalent with the absolute destructionof the environment and is under extinction.In the last years a new type of gravityequipment have been produced which create agravitational field up to 200 G and can separategold from gangue minerals at sizes below 50μm. The strong gravitational field is created bycentrifugal forces and the separation occurs in afluidized bed, formed by water flow.Accumulations of finely disseminated nativegold are found in the sedimentary sequence ofthe Flysch of the Ionian Zone. The main goldminerals are gold and electrum present as freemetal flakes and micro nuggets in the size rangebetween 5-250 μm. Test work, using the FalconSB40 centrifugal concentrator, at theDepartment of Mineral Resources Engineeringat the Technical University of Crete, has shownthat this particular type of gold ore can beprocessed by gravitational methods that requireno reagents and are environmentally safe.

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