How You Can Improve Your Cyanide Testing Process Now

Updated August 18, 2021

Cyanide is the most common and efficient commercial gold leaching reagents. However, it does pose its certain challenges to the many mine operators who still struggle to efficiently manage their cyanide concentrations due to limitations of traditional analytical methods such as manual titration. Challenges range from user bias, unknown interference in the samples, to errors in calibration and extensive equipment maintenance.

How Can You Adjust Your Cyanide Monitoring?

To help mine operators understand where they stand in regards to their current cyanide monitoring process, consider some of the following questions:

- Are the operators working similarly?

- Do measurements need to be repeated often?

- Do you think you consume too much cyanide? 

- Do you think you recover too little precious metal?

- Do you need to spend a fortune removing toxic reagents from your tailings?

- Do things simply not add up?

By considering the following questions, you can highlight some of the causes for elevated variability in measurements as well as allow mine operators to understand where they need to take action and close the gaps in regards to cyanide consumption, gold recovery rates, and turnaround time for corrective actions.

If you happen to have answered no to several or all of the questions above, then we have prepared a list of easy and quick to implement fixes.

Quick Fixes in Regards to Cyanide Monitoring

- Evaluate your choice of the endpoint indicator – The efficiency of endpoint indicators is affected by the ore composition. For instance, for high copper contents, potassium iodide rather than rhodanine is a better indicator according to this research paper.‍

- Determine your possible interference – Knowing the chemistry of your ore will allow you to assess potential interferences and understand your analytical variance. ‍

- Revisit your sampling regime – Is sampling a consistent process? Is analysis done quickly post sampling? Is the equipment properly cleaned? ‍

- Use reference solutions to examine your accuracy – Reference labs provide cyanide standards, which can support you benchmarking your current analytical system. You can use these standards to better assess the accuracy of your method, also by spiking. ‍

- Check your reagents – Are your reagents still in date? Is the glassware actually clean?

Luckily, our cyanide monitoring solution can help with all these quick fixes and more. If you'd like to learn more about our solution and how it works, then please request a demo.