A comparison study of the flotation and adsorption behaviors of diaspore and kaolinite with quaternary ammonium collectors

• Flotation recovery of diaspore increases with decreasing particle size fraction.
• Several anomalous flotation behaviors of kaolinite are found in this work.
• Two minerals specific surface area difference results in different adsorption.

The flotation and adsorption behaviors of two quaternary ammonium collectors DTAC (dodecyl trimethyl ammonium chloride) and CTAC (cetyltrimethyl ammonium chloride) on diaspore and kaolinite were investigated in this work. The flotation recovery of diaspore increases with the increase of pH and the decrease of particle size, however, the situations for kaolinite are opposite. Furthermore, the influence of pH on flotation of kaolinite decreases with the decrease of particle size, and for the fine particles (undersize 0.045 mm), the flotation recovery with CTAC which has a longer hydrocarbon chain and is believed to have a stronger collecting ability is lower than that with DTAC. The dramatic differences of the flotation behaviors between diaspore and kaolinite are correlated to the differences of their crystal structures. The morphologies of diaspore and kaolinite particles in different size were studied by SEM. The kaolinite particles have much larger specific surface areas (about 7 times) than the diaspore particles due to their layered structure. This leads to the differences of collector adsorption behaviors on kaolinite and diaspore and results in the different flotation behavior.