Mineral processing is the art and technology of processing ores from the mining areas to separate the critical minerals from the waste rock. It includes processes to offer a denser material for the procedure of the following extractive metallurgy.
The main operations are comminution and concentration, but there are other crucial operations in a modern mineral processing plant, involving sampling and analysis and dewatering.
Sampling and Analysis
Routine sampling and analysis of the raw material being processed are undertaken in order to get information crucial for the economic appraisal of ores and concentrates. Moreover, modern plants have fully automatic control machines that conduct in-stream analysis of the material as it is being processed and make changes at any stage in order to create the richest possible concentrate at the lowest possible operating price.
Sampling: Sampling is the extraction from a given lot of material a portion that is representative of the whole yet of appropriate size for analysis. It is done either by hand or by machine. Hand sampling is generally expensive, slow, and unreliable. Therefore, it is normally applied only where the material is not appropriate for machine sampling or where machinery is either not available or too costly to install.
Analysis: After one or more samples are taken from a number of ore passing through a material stream such as a conveyor belt, the samples are decreased to quantities suitable for further analysis. Analytical methods involve chemical, mineralogical, and particle size. In emission spectroscopy, an electric discharge is set between a pair of electrodes, one of which is made of the material being analysed. The electric discharge evaporates a portion of the sample and arouses the elements in the sample to discharge characteristic spectra. Measurement and detraction of the wavelengths and intensities of the emission spectra indicate the identities and concentrations of the elements in the sample.
Comminution
To separate the crucial elements of an ore from the waste rock, the minerals must be liberated from their interlocked state physically by comminution. As a rule, comminution starts 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 required mineral.
In old times, crushers were small, hand-operated pestles and mortars, and grinding was done by millstones turned by men or waterpower. Today, these procedures are carried out in mechanized crushers and mills. Whereas crushing is done mostly under dry circumstances, grinding mills can function both dry and wet, with wet grinding being predominant.
Filtration
Filtration is the extraction of a suspension into a solid filter cake and a liquid filtrate by passing it through a permeable filtering material. Critical factors in this process are the properties of the suspension, the characteristics of the filtering materials (e.g., the width and shape of pores), and the forces applied to the suspension. Filtration is operated out in gravity filters (screens, dewatering bins), in centrifugal filters (screen centrifuges), in vacuum filters (drum cell filters, disk filters), or in pressure filters (filter presses). Such equipment makes it possible to create filter cakes containing 8 to 15 percent moisture.
If you are looking for an ore processing manufacturing plant in India, visit our website now!
Chanderpur 