April 24, 2024
How to Recover Metal from Rock: A Lab Tour
Metallurgy • 2957 Bowers Place Kamloops, BC, Canada V1S 1W5 Organized by Kamloops Adult Learners Society
This event has ended.
About this event
We will provide a tour of the ALS Metallurgy Kamloops laboratory. We will demonstrate how we run testing programs to determine appropriate processes to recover metal out of rock, and provide engineering groups with data to determine if such processes would be economically feasible. This would cover flotation recovery, cyanidation extraction and gravity concentration processes. We will also tour the comminution laboratory where we do tests that determine the amount of power required to break rock ahead of metal recovery, which is a key parameter to determine mine capital and operating costs. The tour will also include the mineralogy laboratory, where we use powerful microscopes to examine what mineral forms the metals are in, and also their texture with other minerals that predisposes how much breakage is required to physically separate the minerals of economic interest. We will also tour the sample preparation laboratory, where rocks and test products are prepared and the assay laboratory where the content of metal in rock and test products is determine to allow for metal balances for each test to be calculated. Finally, we will visit the pilot plant where processes can be tested on a continuous basis.