JIGGING - Toll Treatment

BATEMAN, through its subsidiary Titaco Projects (Pty) Limited and in collaboration with Mintek, builds, owns and operates jigging plants on behalf of mining companies needing to upgrade ores and other enterprises wishing to recover ferro-alloys from slag and waste product dumps. This service significantly augments Titaco's traditional turnkey jigging plant design and construction business.

The service comprises a complete menu, from feasibility studies and raising finance, design and construction to maintenance and operation. An attractive feature is that the client may select any of the elements required. An option for clients with limited borrowing capacity or who do not wish to raise the necessary finances, is that the plant could be owned by Titaco through a toll fee reimbursive arrangement. Another example is that owners of existing jigging plants may simply contract Titaco to operate the plant for them.

The jigging process, developed in collaboration with its joint venture partner, Mintek, has been shown to be effective and efficient in dealing with both coarse and fine material. It can recover alloys and metals from slag dumps and upgrade coal and manganese and iron ores.

Bateman Titaco has successfully designed and built seven of these jigging plants in the past few years. One of these upgrades manganese ores, one recovers ferro- and silico-manganese from slag and five recover ferro-chrome from slag. The plants rely on under-bed air pulsed jigs (the Apic jig is the latest generation of this type) to separate saleable material from waste.

The demonstrated advantages of this process are extremely high recoveries, clean product and an ability to effect separation at large sizes. In the case of ferro-alloys, saleable metal fractions in excess of 25 mm have been achieved. A large proportion of the alloy recovered is directly saleable at no discount.

Recoveries in excess of 95 % have been achieved in all Titaco ferro-alloy jigging plants. They are able to separate 50 mm sized particles and in testwork the Apic jig has treated 70 mm material. Current research and development at Mintek indicates that jigging of 100 mm material at high volumes will soon be a feasibility.