Chinese core journals in science and technology
Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) database
EBSCO Academic Database in the United States
Japan Science and Technology Agency Database (JST)
Bai Yang
In response to the accumulation of base metal cations such as calcium and magnesium during long-term heap leaching operations at a gold mine, which negatively affects production efficiency and quality, a combined technical scheme was proposed involving preliminary calcium removal from barren solution using carbon dioxide and deep calcium removal from pregnant solution using a scale inhibitor. Experimental results determined the optimal process parameters: adjusting the pH of the barren solution to 11.5-12.0, maintaining the carbon dioxide injection pressure at 0.25 MPa, and setting the reaction time to 1.5 h. Under these conditions, the preliminary calcium removal efficiency from the bar-ren solution can stably exceed 90 %. By adding the optimized DN3 scale inhibitor to the pregnant solution at a dosage of 900 mg/L, the calcium adsorption on gold-loaded carbon was reduced by 1.76 percentage points, while the gold adsorp-tion rate increased by 13.38 percentage points, and the cost of acid washing regeneration was significantly reduced. Continu-ous testing demonstrated that this combined technique effectively reduces the impact of calcium and magnesium ions, enhances gold adsorption, and plays a significant role in improving the production process.