Industrial practice on optimizing tailings composition combined with ore concentration processes

Cemented paste backfill (CPB) is increasingly applied in underground mines world-wide and has a broad prospect considering its benefits in environmental protection and ground control.During the paste production，a well-graded aggregate is critical for the achievement of CPB.Mine tailings from the outcome of ore-dressing plant are commonly used as the fill aggregate.However，it is difficult to obtain an ideal particle size distribution for the mine tailings which are roughly mixed with final residuum in ore concentration processes.In this study，a novel industrial method is proposed to select fill aggregates from different parts of ore-dressing processes.With combined design of concentration plant and backfill plant，the tailings with desired particle sizes and proportions during the mineral processing are chosen to produce CPB without disturbing the regular ore concentration.The problems of passively accepting final tailings from ore-dressing plant has been improved.