The characterization and diagnostic leaching study of gold ore from Peranggih deposit, East of Malaysia
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Date
2019-07
Authors
Renny Syazwanie Binti Stephen
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Abstract
In this study, detail characterization and diagnostic leaching test was performed on peranggih deposit to shed light on the refractory characteristics of ore. A preconcentration process was conducted by gravity separation method using Mozley table in order to observe the most associated minerals with gold ore due to its specific gravity. A characterization study was done on bulk and pre-concentrate samples in order to identify the minerals composition via XRD, XRF, SEM/ EDX and optical microscope study. From the XRF and SEM/ EDX analysis, a few significant elements were found in the sample, with the highest is quartz, followed by iron, aluminium, potassium and sulfur detected as minor elements. For mineral phase analysis, the dominant mineral contained in the sample is quartz followed by other minerals such as hematite, aluminium and iron. From the polish section sample under optical microscopy, hematite, pyrite, and quartz grains was identified. As for assying method, two methods were conducted in order to determine the gold content in the sample, which is fire assay analysis and bottle roll test. The overall gold content in the sample is 0.19 g/t and the free milling gold obtained is 0.182 g/t. The diagnostic leaching procedure is achieved by selective leaching and destruction of minerals at stages followed by a cyanide leach step to recover gold that liberated after each stage. As a result, the direct cyanidation at the first step gives 38% of gold recovery which shows that gold associated with oxide whereas second higher of gold recovery was 31.7% after the destruction of sulphide minerals. Hence, most gold ore are associated with sulphide ore such as pyrite due to high sulfur content in XRF analysis and the association of gold with sulfur in EDX analysis.