Recent developments in pulsed power technologies for generating terawatt level powers have made electrocrushing more practical for commercial applications such as disintegration of rocks, ore comminution, mining and spark drilling. The purpose of this research is to determine the effectiveness of using the electrohydraulic/electrocrushing technique in separating valuable minerals from the host-rock. Base metal sulfide ore samples will be selected for electrocrushing and EH fragmentation tests in the Tetra Corporation high energy, pulsed power facility. The test results will be compared with representative samples that have undergone conventional, explosive fragmentation. The electrocrushed and explosively fragmented samples will then undergo fine grinding in a ball mill to determine energy consumption in KW- hrs for each sample, as a function of mean particle size distribution.
