Characterisation of mineralogy and gold deportment for complex tailings deposits using QEMSCAN®

A comprehensive understanding of mineralogical associations and gold deportment is important for identification of the causes of gold losses to tailings and in development of re-treatment procedures to recover this value. Recent advances in the QEMSCAN® system to enhance false positive identification have increased the speed and accuracy of gold particle determination. This increased capability has been combined with a suite of complementary diagnostic chemical techniques to provide a complete methodology for accurate and economic analysis of tailings material.Through this methodology the advantages of combining automated mineralogical techniques with more traditional diagnostic chemical assay have been demonstrated through a case study examining the flotation tailings stream of a Cu–Au operation in North Queensland, Australia. Outcomes of the case study indicated that a significant portion of gold losses were attributable to coarse free gold present in the flotation tailings.