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With the rapid rise of the new energy market, there has been an explosive demand for energy metals. As a "new energy metal in the 21st century", lithium has been pushed to a new peak, and spodumene has also become a key development target for investors. .
At present, the applicable spodumene beneficiation process mainly include hand selection process, pre-desliming process, flotation process, dense medium separation process, magnetic separation process and combined beneficiation process. Let's take a look at these several spodumene beneficiation process and supporting mineral processing equipment.
Use the table of contents below to navigate through the guide:
Manual selection is a process for spodumene to conduct preliminary screening and pre-selection before the formal selection, which is generally completed in the crushing operation section. The ore with a width of not more than 1200mm after crushing is sent to the hand-selecting belt, and the manual hand-selecting is carried out according to its appearance, color, gloss and other conditions. 25~300mm spodumene was selected. The hand-selected belt speed is generally controlled at 0.2~0.4m/s.
The manual selection process has low technical requirements, simple operation process, and does not require special venues and equipment. It only needs to be done on a simple hand-selected belt or hand-selected console. The manual selection process can preliminarily separate the ore from the gangue and improve the selected grade of the ore. However, manual selection requires high labor intensity, relatively low production efficiency, and large waste of resources.
The main equipment used in the manual selection process is: crusher, belt conveyor
Pre-deliming is also called pre-flotation de-sliming, which mainly involves flotation and de-sliming of spodumene before flotation and heavy medium beneficiation. The process is to grind the ore to -0.074mm accounting for 75%, use dodecylamine or cocoamine as the gangue mineral collector, and remove the sludge and mica by flotation.
The pre-desliming process is due to the presence of a large amount of ore sludge in the spodumene flotation system. This will not only affect the flotation effect, but also increase the dosage of the agent. Preliminary desliming can effectively improve the grade of lithium ore and reduce the loss of lithium in the form of lepidolite. At the same time, the mica impurities are effectively removed under the condition of coarse grains, and the energy consumption of grinding is reduced.
The main equipment used in the pre-selection desliming process is: dry ball mill, coarse particle flotation machine, and chemical mixing tank
Flotation is currently the main process used in spodumene beneficiation. Among them, spodumene with relatively pure surface is easily floated by oleic acid and its soaps. For spodumene whose surface is polluted by weathering or polluted by slime in the pulp, due to the presence of harmful ions, it needs to be sorted by positive flotation or reverse flotation with a cationic collector in a strong alkaline environment.
Positive flotation of spodumene: oleic acid and its soap salts are added as collectors in a strong alkaline environment, and the sodium silicate formed by the combination of the added sodium hydroxide and the silicate in the pulp can be used as an inhibitor and can The spodumene is directly floated, so that the gangue minerals remain in the flotation tank.
Spodumene reverse flotation: use lime to adjust to an alkaline environment, add dextrin, starch, etc. as inhibitors to prevent spodumene from remaining in the tank, and use sodium oleate+oxidized paraffin soap as collectors to float The silicate gangue ore is produced, and the reverse flotation is completed. If the mineral contains iron, HF resinate can be added as a foaming agent to further remove iron impurities.
The main equipment of flotation process is: XCF flotation machine, SF flotation machine and JJF flotation machine.
Dense medium selection process is suitable for processing spodumene with finely embedded particle size. There is a certain density difference between this kind of minerals and other gangue minerals, and then the pressure of 0.05-0.20Mpa is fed into the heavy medium cyclone for selection. The underflow part is spodumene, which becomes spodumene concentrate after being deintermediated by a deintermediation screen. The overflow is the gangue ore (quartz, feldspar, biotite, etc.) that becomes tailings after being deintermediated by the deintermediation sieve.
The main equipment used in the heavy medium selection process is: heavy medium cyclone
The magnetic separation process mainly deals with minerals containing iron impurities in spodumene. Due to its weak magnetic properties, it is necessary to remove iron impurities by strong magnetic separation to obtain low-iron spodumene concentrate. The magnetic separation process is used to separate spodumene, which has the advantages of simple operation, easy control and strong adaptability. When a single magnetic separation cannot effectively remove iron, the iron removal operation can be completed by the combined process.
The main equipment used in the magnetic separation process are: wet strong magnetic separator, high gradient magnetic separator, etc.
The combined beneficiation process is mainly used to separate some spodumene with complex associated components, and the single beneficiation process cannot effectively recover the minerals of lithium concentrate. Therefore, separation can be achieved by combined beneficiation process, such as flotation-magnetic separation combined process, flotation-gravity-magnetic separation combined process, flotation-chemical treatment combined process, etc.
The applicable equipment for the combined beneficiation process includes: flotation machine, magnetic separator, jig, shaking table, spiral chute and leaching tank, etc.
The above is the introduction of the commonly used beneficiation process process and beneficiation equipment for spodumene. In the actual beneficiation, which process and supporting equipment to choose, it is necessary to design a reasonable beneficiation plan and equipment selection through experimental analysis, so as to avoid the waste of resources caused by the inappropriate selection process and equipment.
