Method of recovering elemental mercury from soils
AssigneeHunter Mining Company
InventorMichael Chintis
Life of this patent
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Abstract
In a method of recovering elemental mercury from soil, the soil contaminated with elemental mercury is first sized in a screening and pressure-washing step. The fine soil particles which pass through the screening device contain essentially all of the elemental mercury. The screened soil particles are fed in the form of a slurry into a gravitational separator. The resulting soil tailings and discharged and a residue comprising heavy materials and elemental mercury is then fed into a gravitational concentrator for a further separation step. The method allows the recovery of more than 99.5% of elemental mercury.
Claims30
A method of removing elemental mercury from soil, comprising the steps of:
- uniformly sizing the soil containing elemental mercury;
- feeding the elemental mercury containing soil into at least one gravitational separator;
- separating the soil and elemental mercury by gravity into soil tailings and a residue, said residue comprising elemental mercury and heavy materials;
- discharging said soil tailings from said gravitational separator;
- removing said residue from said gravitational separator;
- and
- with a gravitational concentrator, recovering elemental mercury from said residue by gravitation.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.