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Pulp conditioning is a necessary procedure in the coal flotation industry, and optimizing the power input of such processes is in favor of improving flotation efficiency and reducing costs. This paper applied a pulp conditioning system combined with the focused beam reflectance measurement (FBRM) to investigate the impact of power input on coal flotation. Under the same energy input, the highest flotation efficiency of 50.09% was achieved in a pulp conditioning pattern of 1800 rpm-3 min, but the flotation efficiency reached only 36.13% in 1200 rpm-7.2 min. The kerosene collector can disperse into large numbers of droplets that exceed 2000 counts/s at size fractions of −10 μm and 20–50 μm in high power input and achieve better adsorption on coal. In the pulp conditioning process, the coal particle numbers of −50 μm size fraction decreased significantly from 15,000 counts/s to nearly 8000 counts/s at 32.3 W power input and coarse aggregates of 50–1000 μm size were detected. Under high power input conditions caused by high agitation speed, extra energy contributed validly to the kinetic energy of coal particles/collector droplets and the generation of oil-water and oil–coal interfaces. The shear flocculation behavior induced by the high power inputs in pulp conditioning is favorable for the flotation recovery of fine and ultra-fine particles.
Huang et al. (Sat,) studied this question.