In the actual production, not only the copper oxide ore has a high content of slime, but also the copper minerals therein are prone to be lost during the beneficiation. In consideration of these problems, a cyclone desliming system was added to process the tailings after the copper sulfide was preferentially floated. The industrial experiment results show that a copper oxide concentrate grading 19.20% Cu can be obtained with the process recovery of 76.24% by adopting a direct sulphidizing flotation process to reclaim copper oxide minerals from copper sulfide flotation tailings, and the copper grade of tailings can be reduced to 0.94%. After copper sulfide flotation tailings were deslimed by cyclone, a process consisting of flotation of copper oxide minerals from underflow and a wet leaching to recover copper resource from fine slime (overflow) was adopted, resulting in a comprehensive copper oxide concentrate with Cu grade of 24.63% and process recovery of 85.55%, and the final tailings with Cu grade reduced to 0.60%. The indices of the copper oxide concentrate from the flowsheet containing cyclone desliming process are obviously superior to those by direct sulphidizing flotation process. Besides, this flow is relatively simple with reduced unit consumption of reagent for copper oxide flotation.

copper oxide minerals  /  cyclone  /  desliming  /  wet leaching  /  flotation