Investigation of the cyanide leaching optimization for ultrafine grinding gold–silver ore

In recent years, the ultrafine grinding (UFG) process has become increasingly important for the recovery of precious metals (especially for Au and Ag) from raw ores. It is well known that cyanide leaching of gold–silver ore has been an accepted process in the world. In the current study, UFG was proposed as a pretreatment method prior to cyanide leaching of a gold–silver ore. First, the ore was crushed and ground by jaw, cone crusher, and ring mill, respectively. Particle size of ground product was 75 µm based d80. Second, the fine product was subjected to the grinding process by vertical wet stirred ball mill, and the final ultrafine product was used as leach feed material. The leach feed material had about d80 = 20 µm and d50 = 6.02 µm particle size. Some important leaching parameters were optimized by using the ultrafine powder in the study. The final leach experiments demonstrated that the recoveries of Au and Ag were 91.92% and 82.15% under optimum leaching conditions such as 150 kg/t quicklime dosage, 25% pulp density, 85°C leach temperature, 500 g/t cyanide concentration, and 90 h leaching time.