LEACHING OF COARSE CALICHE ORE. EXPERIMENT AND MODELLING

Heap leaching of caliche ores is frequently performed with run-of-mine (ROM) material, which includes rocks of very different sizes; however, most of the experimental data are obtained using small particles. To contribute to the understanding of caliche leaching, an experiment using coarse particles was carried out. The recoveries obtained from this experiment were compared with those observed in the leaching of fine particles and, as expected, a larger volume of leachant was required for leaching coarse particles to reach the same recovery. For the highly soluble species nitrate, the recovery was modelled using a previously developed model, obtaining good agreement without any fitting by using only the mass transfer coefficient obtained, by fitting, from fine particle leaching data in previous works. Physical properties such as permeability and capillarity were determined, showing that capillary forces are large, but that the permeability is very small, implying that flow through caliche particles should be very small.