- Title
- Selective capture of binary mixtures of particles by a central bubble: a discrete element method study
- Creator
- Moreno-Atanasio, Roberto; Dobbie, Liam; Evans, Geoffrey M.
- Relation
- CHEMECA 2013 . Proceedings of CHEMECA 2013 (Brisbane, Qld 29 September - 3 October, 2013)
- Publisher
- Engineers Australia
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Computer simulations using discrete element method (DEM) have been carried out to analyse the effect of the hydrophobic force on the selectivity of capture of binary mixtures of hydrophobic particles by a stationary bubble. Two different types of systems have been considered. In the first one, particles were initially created within a maximum distance of 1μm from the bubble surface (spherical distribution). In the second type of systems the particles were created above the bubble. In both cases, an exponential model was used to simulate the hydrophobic force between bubble and particles. Binary mixtures made of two sets of particles of 66 μm in diameter, each of them possessing a different hydrophobicity, were simulated. The capture of particles was investigated for values of the strength of the hydrophobic interaction in the first set ranging between 2.0x10-3 and 2.0x10-5 N. The strength of the hydrophobic force between the particles in the second set and the bubble was then decreased by a maximum of 5 orders of magnitude with respect to the values in the first set. The results show that the total number of collected particles was larger for the top distribution than for the spherical one. This was due to the favouring action of gravity which pulled the particles towards the bubble in the former case and away from it in the latter case. In addition, in order to recover only particles from the first set while leaving the other particles in the bulk a reduction of the hydrophobic force strength of around 50 times was needed. It is intended that a further sophistication of this model by including fluid flow around the bubble would provide a useful tool to investigate the selective capture of particles in froth flotation.
- Subject
- discrete element method; floatation; selectivity; bubble; hydrophobicity
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1336849
- Identifier
- uon:27713
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781922107077
- Language
- eng
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