Surface energy of minerals – Applications to flotation

•Inverse gas chromatography has been shown to be able to characterize mineral surfaces.•Surface energy profile of quartz was determined using IGC.•Surface heterogeneity observed.•Conditioning with dodecylamine resulted in more homogeneous surface.•Hydrophobicity observed from work of adhesion calculated from surface energy.

Inverse gas chromatography (IGC) is a versatile and powerful technique for characterizing physicochemical properties of materials. One such property, the surface energy, plays an important role in the adhesiveness, wettability, and consequently flotation of minerals. In this work, quartz was chosen as a naturally hydrophilic mineral, and dodecylamine was used to hydrophobise the surface. To study the correlation between the surface properties as measured from IGC experiments and flotation, microflotation experiments were also conducted. It was shown that with treatment by dodecylamine, the surface energy decreased, as did the work of adhesion to water. The recovery of quartz increased after the treatment, indicating a correlation between surface energy and flotation response.The results indicate that IGC has the capability to determine the thermodynamic properties of quartz, pre- and post-conditioning. Relating the hydrophobicity and flotation of minerals to the surface energy can be observed from combining the results of IGC and microflotation experiments.