Geospatial Analysis and Beneficiation Studies on Iron Ores of Sandur Schist Belt, Dharwar Craton, India

Depletion of iron ore grade makes it predictable to utilize the existing low-grade iron ores with suitable mineral processing techniques to meet the present requirement and demand. Economic beneficiation of these low-grade iron ores remains a challenging task. To find out an effective way of data acquisition, data management, and processing of mineral resources with an in-depth modern and innovative technology like geospatial analysis technique is found essential. A geospatial analysis as a direct adjunct to the field and more recently geo-informatics has played an important role in the study of mineral resource identification and its beneficiation. The present study focused on the diagnostic processing characteristics of iron ores of the Nandihalli area of the Sandur schist belt using geo-informatics. Using Geo-informatics the iron ore samples were drawn from spatial location points. The mineralogical studies reveal that hematite is the major iron-bearing mineral magnetite as minor iron-bearing mineral and silica alumina as the gangue minerals. Beneficiation studies involving crushing, classification, de-sliming, spiral concentrate, and HGMS (SLon) are tested for the production of quality concentrates. The results indicated that iron ore samples of the Nandihalli area contain 59.78% Fe (T), 4.49% SiO2 and 4.39% Al2O3 has obtained different products namely sinter grade concentrate (60.98% Fe, 2.83% SiO2, and 3.72% Al2O3) with 70% weight recovery and pellet grade concentrate (62.39% Fe, 1.93% SiO2 and 2.02% Al2O3) with 15% weight recovery.