Importance of Mineralogy in Mineral Processing

Abstract

Mineral processing technology is evolved to separate and recover ore minerals from gangue in a commercially viable method and is mainly based on the process of mineral liberation and the process of mineral separation. Though ore is mined with the highest efficiency of the technology, the excavated ore gets partly contaminated by the surroun-ding host rock (overburden) and the geological material closely associated with the ore during mining. Both the materials are undesirable and hence form the gangue. Thus, the contributors to gangue may be igneous rock, sedi-mentary rock (shale, quartzite, phyllite), hydrothermal vein material, quartz reef and their metamorphic equi-valents. For example, chromite and magnetite may form in a magmatic crystallization process whereas iron ore may form in a sedimentary environment with the episodes of metamorphism, supergene enrichment and martitisation. So, the former is associated with ultramafics (dunite, peridotite, serpentinite), basalt, gabbro whereas the latter is associated with shale, jasper, quartzite, and their weathered equivalents (kaolinitic and gibbsitic shale, quartzite, laterite etc.). So, the expected gangue minerals are different in these two cases. Similarly, the sulphide mineralisation is associated with hydrothermal veins ( quartz vein or quartz reef) intruded into various rock types (granites, basalt, meta-basalt, meta-sedimentary rocks). The Table-1 enlists the possible ore minerals and gangue minerals in the ores from wide range of deposits.