The poor flotability of niccolite can also be seen when the be- haviour of the mineral is compared with that of two other common nickel minerals, gersdorffite and pentlandite, prepared and floated under similar conditions.
Such a comparison is presented in Fig. 2 in which the recovery of the sulphides with time using 120 g/t of col- lector is plotted together with the corresponding data for niccolite repeated from Fig. 1.
The recovery of both sulphides reaches 90% in 8 min while the recovery of niccolite reaches just 20%.