Abstract
Spontaneous combustion is one of the more serious problems in the mining of sulphide ore deposits. It is, therefore, very important to invent a reliable and simple method to estimate the oxidation potential of sulphide ores. In this paper, the coincidence of relevant factors (e.g. oxygen absorption quantity, weight increment, water-soluble iron ions and sulphate ion of sulphide ore samples in the oxidation process) were investigated both in theory and through experiment. Based on a large number of tests for two group samples of sulphide ores from two mines, some important conclusions were obtained. The results achieved by the investigation indicate that there is no general interpretation relative to the oxygen absorption and the formation products of sulphate ion and water-soluble iron ions during the oxidation process of sulphide ores at ambient temperature. However, the weight increment of the sulphide ore samples in the oxidation process at ambient temperature has a linear relationship with the quantity of oxygen absorption. Therefore, the simple and cheap weight-scaling method would appear to be suitable for predicting the oxygen absorption performance of sulphide ores at ambient temperature in place of the expensive and complicated chemical method used hitherto. Furthermore, combined with other items of breeding-fire test, the weight increment potential can also be used to predict the spontaneous combustion tendency of sulphide ores.
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