Froth flotation of minerals
Flotación por espuma de minerales
- Date
- 1901-1905 · confidence medium
- Place
- Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia
- Credited to
- Charles Potter, Guillaume Delprat and others
- Field
- Matter & energy
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
A process that separates sulphide minerals from gangue by making hydrophobic particles stick to bubbles in a reagent bath. It was born in the lead and zinc mines of Broken Hill and allowed poor deposits to be worked.
Patents (Potter 1901, Delprat 1902, the Elmore brothers and others) overlapped for years and priority was disputed in court; the modern froth form is associated with the Broken Hill tests and Minerals Separation (1905-1906).
What it led to
- large-scale mining of low-grade copper, lead and zinc
- flotation reagents and surface chemistry
- cheaper industrial metals in the 20th century