Remediation by Ion Flotation Technique of Contaminated Waters with Cyanide

ABSTRACT The substances which are containing cyano (CN) group are called cyanide. There are two types of cyanide substances: organic cyanides and inorganic cyanides. Inorganic cyanides have negatively charged ions, like sodium cyanide, copper(i) cyanide and ferrocyanide, on the other hand, like methyl cyanide, organic cyanides includes covalent cyano group (MacLennan and Moiemen, 2015). Main purpose of production of cyanide is for the mining of silver and gold. Cyanidation process purpose is to extract gold from ores which are low graded by a hydrometallurgical technique which basically is a conversion process of gold into a complex that can be soluble in water. In range of gold extraction processes, gold cyanidation is the most used leaching technique (Gail, Gos, Kulzer, Lorösch, Rubo, Sauer, Kellens, Reddy, Steier, and Hasenpusch, 2011). It is also used generally in silver extraction process in the end of the froth flotation step (Etris, 2000). In this graduation thesis, for the remediation of the water from mining contaminations with cyanide, ion flotation experiments are used. Flotation is a technique used in mineral processing which allows to separate and concentrate ores depending on their surface properties, such as hydrophobic or hydrophilic condition, it defines the repulsion or attraction of water. Ion flotation can be considered as a preference option since it has a high recovery rate and provides selective separation, also it is a quick and respectively low-cost method that can be applied to recover or remove many low-concentrated metals (Yenial, and Bulut, 2017). Ion flotation technique is a very basic process for ion concentration in dilute solutions. Addition of surfactant lets the adsorption at the surface where the bubbles are formed and becomes the froth product in the dilute solution. For the selection of the optimal ion flotation process, many types of conditions and reagents are experimented. In the end, most suitable condition and reagents are understanded for remediating the contaminated waters by cyanide.