Adsorption of Sodium of Polyaspartic Acid on Serpentine and Its Effects on Selective Pyrite/Serpentine Flotation

Due to the optimum dissolution of the hydroxyl ion, serpentine is positively charged and tends to cover the sulfide mineral surface as a slime coating through electrostatic attraction, which intensively worsens sulfide flotation. To handle this problem, the sodium of polyaspartic acid (PASP) was employed as the selective depressant for the flotation of pyrite from serpentine in this work. Micro-flotation results showed that the fine serpentine of −10 µm could intensively hinder pyrite flotation, with a maximum decrease of about 75.8% in pyrite recovery at pH 9. However, at this pH, pyrite recovery remarkably increased from 20.17% to 92.68% when 15 mg/L PASP was introduced. Zeta potential results depicted that the addition of PASP overcompensated the positive charge on the serpentine surface and rendered it negative, while it had little impact on that of pyrite. Hence, the hetero-coagulation between serpentine and pyrite was broken due to the electrostatic repulsion, which was further confirmed by turbidity results. After that, the adsorption of PAX on the pyrite surface was restored, and the selective flotation of pyrite from serpentine was obtained. XPS analyses revealed that the chelation interaction between the carboxylate groups in PASP and the magnesium cations that remained on the serpentine surface were the main driving forces for the adsorption of PASP on the serpentine surface.