Effect of Iron Bearing Minerals on the Iron Ore Processing

The most important step in mineral processing is the mineral identification of the sample. If this step is missed or the minerals are wrongly characterized, any further processing will be challenging, and may not be successful. in the current study, elemental analysis and mineralogy were carried out on the iron ore sample to choose the best processing strategy. Most of the iron-bearing minerals were initially detected as hematite and magnetite. Therefore, gravity and magnetic separation methods were chosen. However, the results of the processing tests were not favorable as the grade and iron recovery in the high-intensity magnetic separator were only 32 and 33%, respectively. In addition, in gravity separation, the iron grade in the tailing was about 1.6 times more than the concentrate. Further, the sample was analysed using quantitative X-ray diffraction, and the iron-bearing minerals were identified as hematite, goethite, ankerite and limonite. The behavioral of some of these minerals was found to be the reason for unsuccessful separation, which is fully discussed in this paper. Therefore, it is highly recommended to characterise the sample in different ways to be able to choose the best processing strategy.