Dewatering Technology
If the material contains a good portion of fines smaller than 20 microns, paste may be an option. This may involve deep cone thickeners, filter presses. New flocculants are often developed and sometimes a certain yield stress can be achieved at the point of discharge through the use of in-line rheology modifiers in the pipeline. There is also a lot of research in Canada's oilsand on air drying ■
Tailings Dewatering
Hello Jason,
The table type plate vacuum filters
do a marvelous job from what knowledge
I have of them as they provide a huge
area of filter cloth to remove the liquids
and create a sludge product.
I wonder if Aluminum Sulfate would help you
more effectively in the clarifiers to increase your
sludge production and clear water skimming that
allow you to use a flat table type vacuum filter with
a huge area for moisture removal.
We use it over here for removing Colloidal Clays in drinking water.
I used it myself for our well water using a chlorine injection pump
to inject the alum solution in our drinking pipe to the sludge settling tank.
Leon ■
Dewatering Strategies for Tailings Handling
Fellow forum readers & contributers, I am involved in a tailings dam processing facility in Australia & are curious to hear about improvements in dewatering technologies that have been successful around the globe.
We currently use a clarifier to process our tailings to improve the dewatering. We process around 10,000 m3 per day of the material, footprint & drying times are critical to managing the deposition to dam cells as you can appreciate.
Appreciation in advance for thoughts & comments on this topic.
Gibbsy ■