Bridging Laboratory and Field Performance in Copper Sulfide Bio-Heap Leaching: Critical Evaluation of Bottle-Roll, Column, and Pilot Testing

Laboratory extraction profiles from copper sulfide bioleaching are frequently treated as predictors of heap performance. However, the experimental regimes differ in wetting, gas access, thermal inertia, microbial attachment, and mineralogical heterogeneity. This critical review evaluates the transferability of evidence across bottle-roll or stirred tests, packed columns, large columns, pilot heaps, and commercial operations. The synthesis integrates the supplied bibliography, explicitly distinguishing copper-specific evidence, mechanistic evidence from acidophilic systems, and transferable analogies from other leaching ores. Bottle tests are useful for preliminary reaction screening but cannot resolve preferential flow or gravity drainage; columns introduce coupled liquid–gas transport, whereas pilot heaps are needed to test the persistence of aeration, solution distribution, and thermal gradients under more representative boundary conditions. The proposed framework treats scale-up as preservation of coupled mechanisms, not replication of an isolated recovery percentage. A tiered evidence ladder, scale-fidelity matrix, and decision gates guide the design, reporting, and interpretation of industrially relevant test programs.