Phosphate ore is an important chemical mineral raw material, widely used in fertilizers, medicine, food, ceramics, national defense, aerospace, chemical industry and other industrial fields. In the process of phosphate ore beneficiation, the rational selection of beneficiation technology is the key to improving the utilization rate of minerals. Common phosphate ore beneficiation methods include scrubbing and desludging, gravity separation, flotation and roasting-digestion process. The comprehensive use of these processes can significantly improve the recovery rate and product quality of phosphate, thereby meeting the needs of various industrial sectors for high-quality phosphate raw materials.
The scrubbing and desludging method is mainly used to treat phosphate ore with a high degree of weathering or a high mud content. This method removes mud and impurities on the surface of the ore by physical means to improve the subsequent mineral processing grade. It is usually used as a pretreatment process before flotation. This process does not use chemical agents and is environmentally friendly and pollution-free. The process includes placing the ore in water for scrubbing or grinding, and then grading it after removing the mud. For severely weathered ores, the "scrubbing and desludging-flotation" combined process is often used to recover phosphorus in the scrubbing tailings and improve resource utilization.
Phosphate ore gravity separation method uses the difference in mineral density to achieve different movement speeds in water, air or other high-density media to separate phosphate minerals from gangue minerals. It mainly uses heavy medium cyclone separation, uses heavy suspensions configured with heavy minerals such as ferrosilicon as heavy medium, and adopts graded desludging + one coarse and one fine heavy medium separation process.
It has the advantages of simple operation, low cost, easy management and no pollution. However, due to the close density of phosphate ore and gangue (such as calcite, dolomite, quartz), it is difficult to reach the concentrate standard alone, and it is usually used as a pretreatment process. For fine-grained phosphate ore, due to the poor recovery effect of heavy medium separation, flotation method is also needed for further separation.
Flotation is one of the commonly used processes in phosphate ore beneficiation, with the characteristics of high beneficiation efficiency and good product quality. Phosphate ore flotation grinds the ore into pulp, adds an appropriate amount of flotation reagent and introduces air, so that hydrophobic mineral particles adhere to the bubbles, form a foam layer and then scrape it out, while hydrophilic minerals remain in the pulp.
According to the properties of phosphate ore, flotation methods are divided into positive flotation, reverse flotation, positive-reverse (reverse-positive) flotation, double reverse flotation, etc. Among them, positive flotation mainly uses effective carbonate mineral inhibitors and fatty acid collectors to select phosphate minerals; while reverse flotation is mainly used to separate phosphate minerals from calcium carbonate gangue minerals, using sulfuric acid or phosphoric acid to inhibit phosphate minerals, and using suitable collectors to float out calcium carbonate gangue minerals or silicate minerals. In addition, in some complex ore processing, amphoteric collectors are also used to improve the recovery rate and concentrate grade of phosphate ore.
Phosphate ore roasting-digestion process is a chemical beneficiation method, which is mainly suitable for sedimentary calcium phosphate rock with hard ore, low grade and more calcium phosphate minerals. This process uses roasting to decompose carbonate minerals at high temperature, release carbon dioxide, generate solid products such as lime and periclase, add water for hydration reaction, generate fine-grained calcium hydroxide and magnesium hydroxide, and then remove calcium and magnesium hydroxide by classification, so as to achieve the enrichment of phosphate minerals.
In the actual production process, the first step is to carry out mineral processing tests to analyze the properties and impurity components of the ore. Based on the test results, a reasonable mineral processing process can be developed. Reasonable phosphate ore beneficiation process can not only significantly improve the quality and output of concentrate, but also effectively improve the utilization rate of ore resources, reduce production costs, and achieve the dual goals of economic benefits and sustainable utilization of resources.
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