How to Conduct Ore Dressing Work of Bauxite?

Importance of bauxite ore beneficiation

With the development of modern industry, aluminum as metals and alloys material has been applied to aviation and military industry and then to civilian industry. At present, the largest use amount of aluminum is in the building, transportation and packaging department around the world, which accounts for over 60% of total aluminum consumption.

In 1996, the world's aluminum production has reached 20.92 million tons. Recently, the international aluminum association announced that global aluminum production in September 2017 was 46.95 million tons. Aluminum has been the second most important metal after iron and steel.

Where is the aluminum from? The answer is bauxite. Therefore, it is especially important for the processing and application of bauxite. Today we will focus on introducing the ore dressing work of bauxite.

Available equipment of bauxite ore beneficiation

Ore beneficiation of bauxite is to make bauxite have floatability by changing the properties of ore surface, and then to separate the target minerals from the gangue. The ore dressing line of bauxite usually includes the main processes of crushing, grinding and flotation. The key equipment is the ball mill and the flotation machine.

Technology used in ore dressing of bauxite

Bauxite is mainly composed of the aluminosilicate which has been decomposed and hydrolyzed. According to the technical analysis, we can use the ore dissociation technology of the dry and wet two stages. It can not only guarantee the better ore dissociation, but also save investment and reduce grinding cost.

In the process of bauxite flotation, we can use the integrated micro-bubble rapid flotation technology, which can completely overcome the existing technical difficulties of the bauxite ore beneficiation. We can choose the gradient flotation process to isolate the coarse particles with high content of aluminum from the tailings. Then we can carry on the deep grinding and dissociation and do the separate flotation for them, so as to improve the concentrate yield and the total recovery rate of alumina.

We can adopt the direct filter way on the fine pulp and concentrated pressure filtration process on the tail pulp. The final waste ore can be directly made into baking-free bricks.

What steps are required to extract alumina from bauxite?

1. Crushing and mixing

We can use the two-stage crushing scheme and crush the bauxite ore to the particle size less than 25mm. The broken ore is sent into the dry and wet ore mixing shed.

2. Bauxite mineral dissociation

We should choose the dry-wet two-section grinding way. The ore goes into the ore bin after grinding through the dry ball mill. After the ore is measured by the quantitative belt, it is sent to the wet ball mill. We can select the overflow ball mill as the wet grinding mill.

After grinding, the qualified ore pulp density should be 34-36 %. The particles above 0.074mm are not more than 15%. Its PH value is between 9.5 and 9.8.

The ore pulp is sent to the spiral classifier by the pulp pump. After classifying, the coarse particles are returned to overflow ball mill for regrinding, qualified ore pulp enters the ore pulp tank. In the ore pulp mixing, a certain amount of collector is added to the ore pulp.

3. Flotation process

We can use one set of SF-1.2 integrated micro-bubble rapid flotation system with36-95m3/h ore pulp processing capacity. It can annually produce 200,000 tons of concentrate.

After the ore pulp is modulated by the collecting agent, it is fed directly into the flotation machine for flotation by pulp feeding pump. Finally, the concentrate will enter the concentrate trough and then enter the filter press.

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