讲座时间

讲座题目

周二（4月3日）

15:00-16:00

New Chemistries for Sustainable Processing of Raw Materials

摘要：Flotation in mineral processing routinely employs toxic or hazardous reagents to recover valuable minerals from ores. These reagents have adverse health effects on the users and pollute the environment after disposal in tailing ponds. The progressive tightening of wastewater and health regulations portends a future where the industry will be committed to replace the toxic reagents by greener and renewable. Greening the economy requires the introduction of environmentally sustainable renewable surfactants (collectors and regulators) in flotation.

The newly developed reagents have to be environmentally friendly while keeping their selectivity and efficiency in flotation. An approach involving computational chemistry and in-situ spectroscopic methods of characterization at solid surfaces to rationalize the design of non-toxic molecular structures (surfactants) for mineral separation systems will be presented. In parallel, sugar based surfactants and biosurfactants (i.e., from microbial origin) which need to be benchmarked against the synthetic homologues will also be discussed.

周三（4月4日）

15:00-16:00

Revisiting Sulphide Mineral Processing: A Few Priorities and Directions

摘要：Large efforts are being made to streamline the conventional technological schemes of ore processing, in particular froth flotation towards reducing overall cost, limiting the use of dangerous substances, decreasing waste streams and improving waste disposal. Hitherto, search for such innovations has been performed mainly empirically and there is an urgent need to shift these technologies to be more innovative and effective.

Molecular level knowledge and coherent understanding of minerals contacted with aqueous solutions is required which underlie great opportunities in controlling mineral–solution interfaces towards the grand challenge of tomorrow’s science and mineral processing technology. Aqueous redox chemistry of sulphides and adsorption mechanisms, the problems of flotation selectivity between ferrous and non-ferrous metal sulphides and fine particle flotation will be highlighted and discussed. The requisite knowledge and research needs to address these issues will also be presented.