ME journal
Last year, Mr. Onur Guven, PhD candidate in the program of mineral processing engineering at the Istanbul Technical University in Turkey, working under a supervision of Prof. Mehmet S. Celik, spent a few months in our laboratories. He researched the effect of particle surface roughness on flotation separation of particles from electrolyte solutions. The results of his experimental work supported by theoretical analysis were recently summarized in a new article entitled “Flotation of methylated roughened glass particles and analysis of particle – bubble energy barrier” and published in the Minerals Engineering journal. In this publication, co-authored by Onur Guven, Mehmet Celik and Jarek Drelich, we claim, for the first time, that the size of nano-sized hydrophobic asperities distributed over spherical microscopic particles dictate the magnitude of the energetic barrier that particles need to overcome in order to attach to gas bubbles. This claim is strongly supported by theoretical modelling.
