Application of statistical analysis for optimizing of column flotation with pine oil for oil shale cleaning
Ahmed Sobhy, Ahmed Yehia, F. I. El Hosiny, Suzan S. Ibrahim, Rasha Amin
Abstract
Oil shale must have a large quantity of kerogen to be of economic benefit, but oil shale with about 30% kerogen is a low-quality ore. Thus, the column flotation technique has been utilized to increase its quality, and the results were analyzed by a reduced two-level factorial design to optimize the interaction effects of seven parameters by response surface modeling. The perturbation plots were used to identify the optimum conditions leading to a predicted maximum kerogen concentration of 53.2% and kerogen recovery of about 81% at estimated optimum conditions of 15% solid concentration, 0.36 cm/s superficial wash water flow rate, 0.28 cm/s superficial feed flow rate, 10 ppm frother concentration, 10 cm froth depth, 1.5 cm/s superficial air flow rate, and 1.5 kg/t pine oil collector dosage. Whereas, the validation experiments under these optimum values gave similar kerogen concentration and recovery of about 52.9–53.6% and 80–82%, respectively.