air pressure-assisted centrifugal dewatering of concentrated fine sulfide particles硫化集中细粒子的空气pressure-assisted离心脱水.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Rotating Machinery Volume 2011, Article ID 131824, 7 pages doi:10.1155/2011/131824 Research Article Air Pressure-Assisted Centrifugal Dewatering of Concentrated Fine Sulfide Particles R. Asmatulu Mechanical Engineering Department, Wichita State University, 1845 Fairmount, Wichita, KS 67260-0133, USA Correspondence should be addressed to R. Asmatulu, ramazan.asmatulu@ Received 19 July 2010; Revised 9 March 2011; Accepted 28 March 2011 Academic Editor: R. Amano Copyright © 2011 R. Asmatulu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. An air pressure-assisted centrifugal dewatering method was developed and used for the dewatering of concentrated finesulfide particles, such as sphalerite, galena, and chalcopyrite. This filtration method was mainly designed to increase the filtration rate during the drainage cycle and, hence, produce drier filter cakes, which in turn could reduce the cost and emission problems/concerns of thermal dryers in the preparation plants. Several dewatering parameters, including applied pressure, centrifugal force (G-force), spin time, cake thickness, and surface hydrophobization, were tested to optimize the processing conditions. Test results showed that, at higher air pressure and centrifugal force, the cake moisture reduction was more than 70%, depending on the testing conditions. As a result, it can be-concluded that the novel filtration method effectively works on the dewatering of fine particles (–150 μm). 1. Introduction