Hey guys, my name is Jason with Mt.
Baker Mining and Metals.
And we have a super cool sample to run today.
I'm super excited about this!
This is the waste, the leftover stuff from copper wire granulators, so how this works,
is they chop up the copper wire into real fine little pieces and the copper comes off
an air table, and the copper is heavy so it goes up the plastic and the paper is real
light so it comes down into the tailings, but they lose a lot of little tiny copper
wires and little hairs and little flakes and copper dust into the waste.
So we are going to take this material and run it through one of our 16" x 12" hammer
mills behind me, it has a 2 millimeter by 1 inch long slot in it, it'll help wet it
and break up the little hair wires and stuff with hooks and liberate the plastic from the
remaining copper, come down onto the shaker table, the coppers going to come across to
your left into the number 1 and number 2 and the 3 and 4 should have most of the plastic
and paper goes down into the waste.
So, we will run this, super excited to see what happens and hopefully, we can recover
quite a bit more copper out of the material.
(machine noise) So what we've got here, we've stopped the table in the middle of the process
of running the granulated copper chops and what we can see is, a high percentage of copper
coming out of the top two long groves, working over towards the left, under the water bar.
And then, further, down the table here, we've got a little bit of leftover plastic, most
of the plastic ended up down in the number 4 waste but there's a little plastic, that
multicolored granules that you see coming down into number 3 here, and then, starting
on the second long grove we've got those white flecks coming out, they're less dense than
the copper because they're coming down the table, instead of across the table.
There's more in this grove here and you can see them the same operation here with the
copper migrating to the left and the white flecks migrating pretty much straight down
the table and as it turns out those white flecks, those are the aluminum components
of the granulator waste.
And before we ran it through the hammer mill a lot of that was foil and some of it was
actual wire, but a high percentage of it was foil, so coming down into number 2, we're
catching virtually all of the aluminum in our safety groves and a little bit of the
leftover copper and so coming into number 2 is a high percentage of the aluminum and
then coming into number 1 is a very high percentage of the copper and its almost absolutely pure
little granules coming into number 1 of the copper fraction.
This is really a remarkable success, there's a huge amount of valuable copper material
in the waste copper chops.
(machine noise) All of it's fairly small, there's not any number 14, 16 in this it's
all, like com wire or extension cord wire that ended up in the air separation waste
material.
Okay so here's the results from our copper granulator test.
This is the waste from copper granulators.
And this is super, super cool, so this is our number 1 fraction, it is pretty much pure
copper, there's hardly any aluminum in there.
We ended up running 29 pounds of the material and this is 2 pounds exactly of copper, so
its about 8 or 9 percent of the weight was copper.
This is our number 2 fraction off of the shaker table, and it's mostly aluminum, there is
a little bit of copper wire that ended up in there, but this is still very, very close
to 100 percent metal by weight.
And this is 1 and 3/4 pounds of metal in our number 2, so when you add them both together
you get 3 and 3/4 pounds of metal, came out of the material.
That's right around 13 percent of the total weight of that granulator waste, still had
metal fractions in it, so this is a huge, huge amount of value that people are throwing
away, that we actually can recover with our shaker table and our hammer mill.
So I am super excited to see the results, I think it was an absolute perfect test, the
results are great.
We saved some buckets, we are going to play with some different screen sizes in our hammer
mill, I think the hammer mill is actually important to help break up the paper and the
copper and the fluff, uh there was one point where we tried to feed it right onto the table
and the material floated off, so it needs to be wetted or mixed somehow, but I think
we can get a huge throughput and recover a whole bunch more metal for these guys that
they are losing and throwing away right now, so.
I hope you enjoyed the video, there is going to be more to come, hopefully, we can get
a bit more efficient at it and I'm really looking forward to seeing you guys in the
next video.
So thanks for watching.