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Mining › Metallurgy and Process Design › Unit Operations and Metallurgical Services

Mining Gravity Separation

Gravity separation is the best-proven and accepted technique of concentrating minerals and SGS has significant expertise with this technology for many commodities. 

Mine

Gravity separation is an attractive unit operation as it generally has low capital and operating costs, uses few of any chemicals that might cause environmental concerns and the recent development of new equipment enhances the range of separations possible.

SGS experts can provide bench-scale flowsheet development, pilot scale testing and plant audit and optimization services, depending on the needs of a project or facility. We provide:

  • Gravity Recovery Gold (GRG)
  • Gravity Separation Testing, including spirals, concentrators, jigs and shaking tables:
    • Knelson and Falcon concentrators
    • Cyclones
    • Wilfley and Mosely shaking tables
    • Dense Media Separation (DMS)

    Expertise and Innovation

    While gravity separation is a well-proven technique, SGS pays careful attention to operating conditions and such care with feed preparation can pay significant dividends.

    Recognizing the fact that efficient gravity separation is a function of particle size and specific density differences, SGS has developed several successful techniques to identify feed size preparation criteria to maximize downstream gravity separation efficiency. This has proven to enhance concentrate grades by 5–10 percent.

    Reasons to Assess Gravity Separation

    • To immediately reject barren waste as an initial pre-concentration step
    • To recover malleable and/or friable coarse heavy minerals from grinding circuit circulating loads – such minerals are otherwise hard to recover after regrinding
    • To concentrate or pre-concentrate heavy minerals to minimize downstream processing costs
    • To clean low weight, high yield bulk concentrates
    • To reclaim pay minerals from plant tailings
    • To generate a precious metal concentrate that can go direct to a refinery rather than a smelter

    SGS technical experts can integrate, design, commission, maintain, and troubleshoot gravity separation systems globally. With our array of equipment and experience, we can readily provide bankable cost effective processing flowsheets and advise on operational best practices during plant start-up based on our extensive production experience.