Rheological characterization of Peruvian copper ore slurries

Mining companies are always seeking for the best method to reduce energy consumption, especially in the grinding pro-cess that usually request about 40% to 75% of the total energy used in a mineral process plant. Under this objective, anyeffort to reduce the energy consumption in mineral process, which involves slurries, should starts with the characteriza-tion of the fluid. Therefore, the main objective of this work involves the rheological characterization of the copper oreslurry from a Peruvian mine deposit. For this study, it was considered to characterize the slurry (66 wt.%) from the outputof the ball mill of the mineral concentrating plant. Furthermore, to explore the effect of the concentration of solids on therheological behavior of those slurries, four additional slurries, at different concentrations (50 wt.%, 60 wt.%, 66 wt.%and 70 wt.%), were produced in the laboratory using a batch type ball mill.Rheological experiments were performed at shear rate ranging from 10-500 s−1using a rotational rheometer. Fromthose experiments, copper ore slurries show shear thinning behavior at any concentration. The results showed that theapparent viscosity increases with the increment of the concentration. Also, for two slurries with the same concentration,the apparent viscosity increases with the number of coarse particles. The experimental flow curves were fitted with themodel of Carreau-Yasuda.