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What is beneficiation?

1. What is beneficiation or mineral processing?

Beneficiation simply means by various kinds of equipments to extract useful minerals from the tailings, in this way useful minerals will be collected for smelting. Generally there are three methods, one is by magnetic separator for magnetic materials like magnetite, one is by gravity method, most for the materials that have specific gravity differences, like Chromite, Hematite, the third one is by flotaiton, like copper ores and gold ores

2. What’s the purpose of beneficiation?

The purpose of beneficiation is get rid of useless materials and tailings from the resources, so can get one or several kind of useful materials for better use. It greatly reduce the transportation cost and smelting cost.

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What is hydrocyclone?

Hydrocyclones have become one of the most important and widely used classifiers in the mineral processing industry. They are also used for de-sliming, de-watering, de-gritting and thickening processes. They are most commonly employed in closed circuit within grinding circuits and are used to return coarse material back to the ball or rod mill for further grinding. The main advantages of cyclones are that they have large capacities relative to their size and can separate at finer sizes than most other screening and classification equipment.

The separation mechanism in hydrocyclones relies on centrifugal force to accelerate the settling of particles. The slurry enters the cylindrical section tangentially above a conical section. The velocity of the slurry increases as it follows a downward helical path from the inlet area to the smaller diameter underflow end. As the slurry flows along this path, centrifugal forces cause the larger and denser particles to migrate to the fluid layer nearest the wall of the cone. Meanwhile, the finer or lower specific gravity particles remain in, migrate to, or are displaced toward the center axis of the cone. As the swirling slurry approaches the underflow tip, smaller and lighter material closer to the center reverses its axial direction and follows a smaller diameter rotating path back toward the top overflow discharge pipe.

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What is classification?

Classification is a method of separating mixtures of minerals into two or more products on the basis of the velocity with which the grains fall through a fluid medium. In mineral processing, this is usually water, and wet classification is generally applied to mineral particles which are considered too fine to be sorted efficiently by screening. Since the velocity of particles in a fluid medium is dependent not only on the size, but also on the specific gravity and shape of the particles, the principles of classification are important in mineral separations utilising gravity concentrators. Classifiers also strongly influence the performance of grinding circuits.

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Mineral processing(ore dressing) flowsheet

Comminution and concentration are two primary operations in mineral processing as it can be seen from the above flowsheet, but many other important steps are involved.

e.g. Sizeing-by screens and classifiers.
Dewatering-by thickeners, filters and driers, etc.
Auxiliary operations-conveying, sampling, etc.