The water contains “collector” substances that can attach to the valuable particles, causing them to repel water and rise to the bubbling top of the water where they can be easily skimmed off.
New technology for recovering valuable minerals from waste rock
Langmuir
Researchers report discovery of a completely new technology for more efficiently separating gold, silver, copper, and other valuable materials from rock and ore. Their report on the process, which uses nanoparticles to latch onto those materials and attach them to air bubbles in a flotation machine, appears in the ACS journal Langmuir.
