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Climate change poses an unprecedented pressure to the extraction and processing of raw materials for energy transmission and electromobility. This implies an increasing demand for copper and lithium, whose extraction and processing cycles are critically dependent on the use of water. Concurrently, progressively decreasing valuable mineral contents in mines imply the need to handle finer ores than ever before, and thus unit processes that recycle water are required to separate finer particles. If done improperly, this can lead to poor water quality and, ultimately, negative effects on mineral recovery rates. Inclined plate clarifiers, which use the Boycott effect (BE) to enhance particle settling in comparison with upright vessels, represent a low footprint solution to remove turbidity from such streams. BE may be further enhanced by forcing part of the flow structure with buoyancy injection through controlled heating. In the present seminar, the impact of such an effect is discussed in light of typical conditions for particle separation both in mineral processing and stormwater treatment plants. To this purpose, two dimensional computational fluid dynamics simulations, with different values of particle concentration and diameter, are presented. Results show that optimum values of heat injection at the upper wall of inclined cells depend on both parameters as a consequence of both the coupling of the BE with natural convection and the drag of particles towards the overflow. The development of hydrodynamic fluctuations of the temperature and velocity distributions throughout the separation between plates is discussed.