Abstract: A new measuring method of dust wetting agent performance was described. Firstly, a small quantity of fine dust is deposited in the preparatory wetting agent solution and disturbed in homogeneously. It is kept for a moment and some dust particles with rather large size have deposited. Then particle sizes and distribution of suspended dust in the solution are measured by a laser particle analyzer with high accuracy. By changing the type of wetting agents and their concentrations in solution but keeping other conditions constant, the particle size and distribution in the solutions are measured again and again with the same test method described above. The variations of particle sizes and distribution of dust suspended in the solutions will be known by the approach and these variations are caused by the changes of wetting agents and concentrations as well as the depositing time. Therefore, the high accuracy laser particle analyzer can be used to measure the dust wetting agent performances indirectly. The measuring method can be applied for inventing new dust wetting agents. Accordingly, some dust sample of concentrated lead-zinc mineral collected from a lead-zinc mine in Hunan province was used for this study. After conducting a great number of tests of measuring the dust particle sizes less than 20 μm, the invented measuring method is proved to be reliable. Also, the optimal compositions of wetting agents for suppressing the lead-zinc dust in the mine were obtained.

Key words: dust; wetting agent performance; laser particle size analyzer; measuring method