Recovery of ultrafine iron values from tailing pond of iron ore washing plants

Vijaya Kumar, T V and Vasumathi, N and Subba Rao, S and Prabhakar, S and Bhaskar Raju, G (2013) Recovery of ultrafine iron values from tailing pond of iron ore washing plants. The Indian Mineralogist, 1-2 . pp. 83-92.

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Abstract

Most of the Iron ore washing plants set up in India in the earlier days consist of sizing of the ore by dry / wet screening, washing and classification by screw classifiers. In this classical approach, iron values were lost in the form of fines and utrafines into the tailing ponds as they had little commercial value in those days and accumulated in huge quantities over the years. As the high grade deposits are getting exhausted and the demand for high grade finer material for pellet making is ever increasing, focus is shifting towards recovering the values from the erstwhile tailing ponds by column flotation. This is also supposed to mitigate to certain extent the environmental problems caused by the ever expanding and unmanageable tailing dams. A case study is presented wherein a composite sample is prepared from samples drawn systematically from multi - locations in a sprawling tailing dam. Laboratory scale column flotation tests on this composite tailings sample, basically originating from two operating iron ore beneficiation plants of JSW Steel Ltd., one of the leading producers of steel in India, are found to be encouraging. De-sliming followed by reverse and cationic flotation tests using flotation column resulted in the concentrate of 61.88% Fe, 4.81% SiO2, 2.52% Al2O3 and 3.30% loss on ignition (LOI) from the tailings analysing 57.86% Fe, 7.10% SiO2, 3.52% Al2O3 and 6.14% LOI with 52% weight recovery. The causes for the quality improvement could be attributed to de-sliming of unliberated ultra fines of kaoline and hydrated iron oxides and their further reduction by efficient flotation process. The process and the cationic collector developed for this purpose are adopted in the new flotation plant created to treat these tailings.

Item Type:Article
Official URL/DOI:http://eprint.nmlindia.org/6978
Uncontrolled Keywords:Iron ore, washing, ultra fines, tailings pond, column flotation
Divisions:NML Chennai
ID Code:6978
Deposited By:Ms. N Vasumathi
Deposited On:06 Aug 2014 16:47
Last Modified:06 Aug 2014 16:47
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