Riddle me this you VTMers...50,000 grams of sample were fed into...

Riddle me this you VTMers...

50,000 grams of sample were fed into the leaching and precipitation process

The report doesn't say how much came out, i.e. the product mass was not stated.

Various losses and recoveries were mentioned along the way but there doesn't seem to be any consistency in those figures:

- TREE impurity removal precipitation extent was 17.1% in Table 2 - I take this to be losses when removing impurities
- TREE MREC precipitation extent was 71.1% - I take this to be the percentage of TREE which was precipitated from the impurity-'free' liquor
- Overall TREE recovery in both impurity removal and REE precipitation stages was 59% (last page of JORC table)

Note that there is no mention of the percentage of TREYO which was leached from the feed sample and fed into impurity removal.

If you put the feed and head grades into a spreadsheet and try to calculate recovery by REO you get the following:



Because there is no overall recovery mentioned you can't get a straight answer. The reo rec % column was generated using goal seek in excel...lutetium seems to have the highest recovery therefore the largest product weight which did not push the lutetium recovery over 100% was sought. You can see that a 141 gram product weight gives a lutetium recovery of 99% (seems unlikely) and a TREYO recovery of 28%.

Any comments anyone?

@T2CupAndHandle
@ChinaSyndrome