Titanium and Zirconium Sand Ore Beneficiation
Company A owns three titanium and zirconium sand ore mines in China. Sand ore is a composite ore which contains titanium and zirconium. Titanium and zirconium are two important raw materials in many industries. Therefore, benefication of the ore is necessary before it can be used in production.
Benefication is the process of separating the valuable minerals from the rest of the ore based on differences in their physical and chemical properties. Generally, it includes ore preparation, ore dressing, ore smelting and final products deep processing. Everyone of these steps needs specific technology and equipments, therefore, beneficiation of the ore will gain huge economic benefit for Company A.
The titanium and zirconium sand ore mined by Company A is of low grade, it tends to contain more impurities such as iron, aluminum, quartz and carbon. Before Company A can get the titanium and zirconium, these impurities need to be removed. Therefore, beneficiation of the ore is essential.
The first step of the beneficiation is ore preparation, that is, crushing and grinding the mined ore. The ore should be grinded to a certain granularity before further processing. Then, Company A needs to seperate useful elements through ore dressing processes. There are many ore dressing methods, such as gravity separation, magnetic separation, flotation and so on. In this case, as the ore mined by Company A is of low-grade, gravity separation should be adopted as the main method. The most important equipment used in this method is jigging machine. Due to the gravity difference between the valuable minerals and the impurities, jigging machine can help to seperate them. The tailings from the jigging machine will contain little impurities, which means most of the useful minerals have been enriched in the jigging machine.
After jigging, the next step of beneficiation is ore smelting. In this step, the enriched ore will be smelted in electric furnace. The smelting process requires a high temperature in electric furnace, usually over 1000 degree Celsius. During the smelting, the useful elements and impurities will be seperated. The useful element titanium and zirconium will become liquid and collect at the bottom of the furnace, while the impurities will become solid and collect at the top of the furnace. Therefore, the useful minerals can be easily gained.
Finally, Company A needs to further process the raw titanium and zirconium material collected from the electric furnace. This process is called deep processing, which includes many techniques and technologies. The final products from deep processing will be the ready to use titanium and zirconium raw material with high purity and fineness.
Benefication of titanium and zirconium sand ore will bring huge economic benefit for Company A. Through ore preparation, ore dressing and ore smelting, most of the impurities can be removed from the ore, therefore, the purity and fineness of the titanium and zirconium materials can be improved. Finally, through deep processing, Company A can gain the high-purity and high-quality titanium and zirconium raw materials, which are cost-effective and of great economic value.
