Engineering Commons^™

Experimental And Machine Learning Studies On Chitosan-Polyacrylamide Copolymers For Selective Separation Of Metal Sulfides In The Froth Flotation Process, Keitumetse Monyake, Taihao Han, Danish Ali, Lana Z. Alagha, Aditya Kumar

Mining Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The froth flotation process is extensively used for the selective separation of valuable base metal sulfides from uneconomic associated minerals. However, in this complex multiphase process, various parameters need to be optimized to ensure separation selectivity and peak performance. In this study, two machine learning (ML) models, artificial neural network (ANN) and random forests (RF), were used to predict the efficiency of in-house synthesized chitosan-polyacrylamide copolymers (C-PAMs) in the depression of iron sulfide minerals (i.e., pyrite) while valuable base metal sulfides (i.e., galena and chalcopyrite) were floated using nine flotation variables as inputs to the models. The prediction performance of …