GOLD RECOVERY WITH ION EXCHANGE RESINS

Auriferous mining has experimented big changes the last years and countries with important gold deposits have done significative investments on gold projects to be developed in the short time. As must be expected, this development promotes the researching of new and appropriate technologies on the treatment of specific auriferous ores in order to recover the gold with low cost and high efficiency.

Carbon-in-pulp (CIP) and Carbon-in-Leach (CIL) are processes very popular for the treatment of aurocyanide solutions but have some limitations such as regenerate the carbon employing high temperatures, its loading efficiency is affected by organic material and clayey minerals, and also have long cycles of extraction. Considering the aspects mentioned above, ion exchange resins have the great possibility to be used in the gold recovery from a cyanidation process. The ion exchange resins present some advantages over activated carbon such as higher loading capacity, regeneration of cyanide ions, periodic reactivation, and organic material does not affect the loading capacity.

The use of ion exchange resins has been proposed as an alternative to more conventional processes such as Merryl Crowe and Carbon-in-Pulp, and specific testwork programs have been done in order to show the viability of the processes with resins. The motivation of this research work was make note the special characteristics of resins that make them adequate for its industrial application.

Considering the ideas exposed above, the present research work try to show the possibilities of employing ion exchange resins in the gold recovery from cyanidation processes.

By

Jorge Ganoza