Z-ray radiometric sorting of barite-polymetallic ores

A possibility of barite-polymetallic ore sorting by X-ray radiometric fluorescence method is studied to create technique of in-line sorting. Investigations are conducted using automatic X-ray radiometric equipment comprising a computer set with the Ehlektronika-60M microcomputer, 109Cd and 241Am sources, SI11R-3 and SI11R-2 proportional counters. It is shown that the method allows one to quite exactly isolate sulfide, lead-zinc, barite-containing lead-zinc (mixed and sulfide), monobarite ores and dead rocks during the sorting. There exists a possibility of separating sulfide and mixed barite-containing lead-zinc ore. It is necessary to use multichannel automatic X-ray radiometric equipment allowing one to realize the sorting on the base of image recognition (using the empiric risk minimization method) in the real time regime