Mineral processing
Èñòî÷íèê: Encyclopedia Britannica
Mineral processing, art of treating crude ores and mineral products in order to separate the valuable minerals from the waste rock, or gangue. It is the first process that most ores undergo after mining in order to provide a more concentrated material for the procedures of extractive metallurgy. The primary operations are comminution and concentration, but there are other important operations in a modern mineral processing plant, including sampling and analysis and dewatering. All these operations are discussed in this article.
Routine sampling and analysis of the raw material being processed are undertaken in order to acquire information necessary for the economic appraisal of ores and concentrates. In addition, modern plants have fully automatic control systems that conduct in-stream analysis of the material as it is being processed and make adjustments at any stage in order to produce the richest possible concentrate at the lowest possible operating cost.
Sampling
Sampling is the removal from a given lot of material a portion that is representative of the whole yet of convenient size for analysis. It is done either by hand or by machine. Hand sampling is usually expensive, slow, and inaccurate, so that it is generally applied only where the material is not suitable for machine sampling (slimy ore, for example) or where machinery is either not available or too expensive to install.
Many different sampling devices are available, including shovels, pipe samplers, and automatic machine samplers. For these sampling machines to provide an accurate representation of the whole lot, the quantity of a single sample, the total number of samples, and the kind of samples taken are of decisive importance. A number of mathematical sampling models have been devised in order to arrive at the appropriate criteria for sampling.
Analysis
After one or more samples are taken from an amount of ore passing through a material stream such as a conveyor belt, the samples are reduced to quantities suitable for further analysis. Analytical methods include chemical, mineralogical, and particle size.
Chemical analysis
Even before the 16th century, comprehensive schemes of assaying (measuring the value of) ores were known, using procedures that do not differ materially from those employed in modern times. Although conventional methods of chemical analysis are used today to detect and estimate quantities of elements in ores and minerals, they are slow and not sufficiently accurate, particularly at low concentrations, to be entirely suitable for process control. As a consequence, to achieve greater efficiency, sophisticated analytical instrumentation is being used to an increasing extent.
In emission spectroscopy, an electric discharge is established between a pair of electrodes, one of which is made of the material being analyzed. The electric discharge vaporizes a portion of the sample and excites the elements in the sample to emit characteristic spectra. Detection and measurement of the wavelengths and intensities of the emission spectra reveal the identities and concentrations of the elements in the sample.
In X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a sample bombarded with X rays gives off fluorescent X-radiation of wavelengths characteristic of its elements. The amount of emitted X-radiation is related to the concentration of individual elements in the sample. The sensitivity and precision of this method are poor for elements of low atomic number (i.e., few protons in the nucleus, such as boron and beryllium), but for slags, ores, sinters, and pellets where the majority of the elements are in the higher atomic number range, as in the case of gold and lead, the method has been generally suitable.
Mineralogical analysis
A successful separation of a valuable mineral from its ore can be determined by heavy-liquid testing, in which a single-sized fraction of a ground ore is suspended in a liquid of high specific gravity. Particles of less density than the liquid remain afloat, while denser particles sink. Several different fractions of particles with the same density (and, hence, similar composition) can be produced, and the valuable mineral components can then be determined by chemical analysis or by microscopic analysis of polished sections.
Size analysis
Coarsely ground minerals can be classified according to size by running them through special sieves or screens, for which various national and international standards have been accepted. One old standard (now obsolete) was the Tyler Series, in which wire screens were identified by mesh size, as measured in wires or openings per inch. Modern standards now classify sieves according to the size of the aperture, as measured in millimetres or micrometres (10-6 metre).
Mineral particles smaller than 50 micrometres can be classified by different optical measurement methods, which employ light or laser beams of various frequencies.
Comminution
In order to separate the valuable components of an ore from the waste rock, the minerals must be liberated from their interlocked state physically by comminution. As a rule, comminution begins by crushing the ore to below a certain size and finishes by grinding it into powder, the ultimate fineness of which depends on the fineness of dissemination of the desired mineral.
In primitive times, crushers were small, hand-operated pestles and mortars, and grinding was done by millstones turned by men, horses, or waterpower. Today, these processes are carried out in mechanized crushers and mills. Whereas crushing is done mostly under dry conditions, grinding mills can be operated both dry and wet, with wet grinding being predominant.
Crushing
Some ores occur in nature as mixtures of discrete mineral particles, such as gold in gravel beds and streams and diamonds in mines. These mixtures require little or no crushing, since the valuables are recoverable using other techniques (breaking up placer material in log washers, for instance). Most ores, however, are made up of hard, tough rock masses that must be crushed before the valuable minerals can be released.
In order to produce a crushed material suitable for use as mill feed (100 percent of the pieces must be less than 10 to 14 millimetres, or 0.4 to 0.6 inch, in diameter), crushing is done in stages. In the primary stage, the devices used are mostly jaw crushers with openings as wide as two metres. These crush the ore to less than 150 millimetres, which is a suitable size to serve as feed for the secondary crushing stage. In this stage, the ore is crushed in cone crushers to less than 10 to 15 millimetres. This material is the feed for the grinding mill.
Grinding
In this process stage, the crushed material can be further disintegrated in a cylinder mill, which is a cylindrical container built to varying length-to-diameter ratios, mounted with the axis substantially horizontal, and partially filled with grinding bodies (e.g., flint stones, iron or steel balls) that are caused to tumble, under the influence of gravity, by revolving the container.
A special development is the autogenous or semiautogenous mill. Autogenous mills operate without grinding bodies; instead, the coarser part of the ore simply grinds itself and the smaller fractions. To semiautogenous mills (which have become widespread), 5 to 10 percent grinding bodies (usually metal spheres) are added.
Crushing/grinding
Yet another development, combining the processes of crushing and grinding, is the roll crusher. This consists essentially of two cylinders that are mounted on horizontal shafts and driven in opposite directions. The cylinders are pressed together under high pressure, so that comminution takes place in the material bed between them.
Concentration
Concentration involves the separation of valuable minerals from the other raw materials received from the grinding mill. In large-scale operations this is accomplished by taking advantage of the different properties of the minerals to be separated. These properties can be colour (optical sorting), density (gravity separation), magnetic or electric (magnetic and electrostatic separation), and physicochemical (flotation separation).
Optical separation
This process is used for the concentration of particles that have sufficiently different colours (the best contrast being black and white) to be detected by the naked eye. In addition, electro-optic detectors collect data on the responses of minerals when exposed to infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light. The same principle, only using gamma radiation, is called radiometric separation.
Gravity separation
Gravity methods use the difference in the density of minerals as the concentrating agent.
In heavy-media separation (also called sink-and-float separation), the medium used is a suspension in water of a finely ground heavy mineral (such as magnetite or arsenopyrite) or technical product (such as ferrosilicon). Such a suspension can simulate a fluid with a higher density than water. When ground ores are fed into the suspension, the gangue particles, having a lower density, tend to float and are removed as tailings, whereas the particles of valuable minerals, having higher density, sink and are also removed. The magnetite or ferrosilicon can be removed from the tailings by magnetic separation and recycled.
In the process called jigging, a water stream is pulsed, or moved by pistons upward and downward, through the material bed. Under the influence of this oscillating motion, the bed is separated into layers of different densities, the heaviest concentrate forming the lowest layer and the lightest product the highest. Important to this process is a thorough classification of the feed, since particles less than one millimetre in size cannot be separated by jigging.
Finer-grained particles (from 1 millimetre to 50 micrometres) can be effectively separated in a flowing stream of water on horizontal or inclined planes. Most systems employ additional forces—for example, centrifugal force on spirals or impact forces on shaking tables. Spirals consist of a vertical spiral channel with an oval cross section. As the pulp flows from the top to the bottom of the channel, heavier particles concentrate on the inner side of the stream, where they can be removed through special openings. Owing to their low energy costs and simplicity of operation, the use of spirals has increased rapidly. They are especially effective at concentrating heavy mineral sands and gold ores.
Gravity concentration on inclined planes is carried out on shaking tables, which can be smoothed or grooved and which are vibrated back and forth at right angles to the flow of water. As the pulp flows down the incline, the ground material is stratified into heavy and light layers in the water; in addition, under the influence of the vibration, the particles are separated in the impact direction. Shaking tables are often used for concentrating finely grained ores of tin, tungsten, niobium, and tantalum.
Flotation separation
Flotation is the most widely used method for the concentration of fine-grained minerals. It takes advantage of the different physicochemical surface properties of minerals—in particular, their wettability, which can be a natural property or one artificially changed by chemical reagents. By altering the hydrophobic (water-repelling) or hydrophilic (water-attracting) conditions of their surfaces, mineral particles suspended in water can be induced to adhere to air bubbles passing through a flotation cell or to remain in the pulp. The air bubbles pass to the upper surface of the pulp and form a froth, which, together with the attached hydrophobic minerals, can be removed. The tailings, containing the hydrophilic minerals, can be removed from the bottom of the cell.
Flotation makes possible the processing of complex intergrown ores containing copper, lead, zinc, and pyrite into separate concentrates and tailings—an impossible task with gravity, magnetic, or electric separation methods. In the past, these metals were recoverable only with expensive metallurgical processes.
Magnetic separation
Magnetic separation is based on the differing degrees of attraction exerted on various minerals by magnetic fields. Success requires that the feed particles fall within a special size spectrum (0.1 to 1 millimetre). With good results, strongly magnetic minerals such as magnetite, franklinite, and pyrrhotite can be removed from gangue minerals by low-intensity magnetic separators. High-intensity devices can separate oxide iron ores such as limonite and siderite as well as iron-bearing manganese, titanium, and tungsten ores and iron-bearing silicates.
Electrostatic separation
The electrostatic method separates particles of different electrical charges and, when possible, of different sizes. When particles of different polarity are brought into an electrical field, they follow different motion trajectories and can be caught separately. Electrostatic separation is used in all plants that process heavy mineral sands bearing zircon, rutile, and monazite. In addition, the cleaning of special iron ore and cassiterite concentrates as well as the separation of cassiterite-scheelite ores are conducted by electrostatic methods.