Disolución de hierro de un concentrado complejo de esfalerita por Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans

En el presente trabajo se empleó una cepa de Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans (Af) para biolixiviar el hierro pirítico presente en un concentrado de sulfuro de zinc con un contenido de 1,41% en peso de hierro. El proceso de biolixiviación se llevó a cabo en una suspensión conteniendo de 5 a 8% de sólidos p/v a un pH de alrededor de 2,7 (ajustado con ácido sulfúrico) y a una temperatura de 30 °C. Los resultados muestran que en un periodo de 15 días, el contenido metalúrgico del hierro disminuyó en un 17%, lo cual se traduce en un incremento en el grado metalúrgico del concentrado de zinc de 64,6 a 66,9%, lo que permitió incrementar  substancialmente el valor comercial de éste, evitando penalizaciones por el contenido de hierro presente

Stochastic particle packing with specified granulometry and porosity

This work presents a technique for particle size generation and placement in arbitrary closed domains. Its main application is the simulation of granular media described by disks. Particle size generation is based on the statistical analysis of granulometric curves which are used as empirical cumulative distribution functions to sample from mixtures of uniform distributions. The desired porosity is attained by selecting a certain number of particles, and their placement is performed by a stochastic point process. We present an application analyzing different types of sand and clay, where we model the grain size with the gamma, lognormal, Weibull and hyperbolic distributions. The parameters from the resulting best fit are used to generate samples from the theoretical distribution, which are used for filling a finite-size area with non-overlapping disks deployed by a Simple Sequential Inhibition stochastic point process. Such filled areas are relevant as plausible inputs for assessing Discrete Element Method and similar techniques