A tale of Fairmined gold, part III
Once gold-bearing ore is extracted, the process moves to crushing and milling, where raw material is transformed into a more manageable form.
The process to liberate gold implies discarding undesirable material by a series of steps that slowly crush and grind the coarse rocks into ever finer material.
This process goes through several stages, from the break up of large pieces of rocks in big machines, to crushing of medium-sized rocks, and grinding of smaller pieces (that sometimes require manual) labor all the way to milling of crushed rock into very fine powder.
The process is a mechanized circuit of jaw crushers, hammer crushers, ball mills, centrifugal machines all the way to the shaking table, which we'll look at in the next post.
Trolley loaded onto the ore processing station, where the rock will be subsequently crushed until the gold can be reached. Photo: © Desirée Binternagel, Fariever.
Ideally the grinding process is efficient enough to get to the point where there are free gold particles flowing in most of the concentrate. But how to get the gold from a thick-grey substance resembling mud?
Stay tuned for the next step in the process.
Top Photo: Milling of the ore, Chede mine. © Shelby Nico Bryant
