The Aquarium at Jwaneng: an automated recovery and sorting plant
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The metallurgical discipline within the De Beers Family of Companies is responsible for the safe, effective and economic extraction of diamonds from the diamond bearing ores at all our operations.
Metallurgical process engineers are also actively involved in designing new metallurgical processing plants in order to determine the economic viability of starting up new mining operations at identified and prospective mineral resources.
The metallurgical processes that are selected to achieve this are based on the properties of both the host rock, as well as the diamonds contained in the rock.
Conventional diamond ore processing can be broken down into four primary processes. These are:
- comminution and liberation
- concentration
- recovery
- fine and course residue disposal