Enhancing mineral liberation of a Canadian rare earth ore with microwave pretreatment

Abstract

Liberation, as an attribute of mineralogy characteristic, whose impacts on finely disseminated Canadian rare earth ore was studied with microwave pretreatment. Samples of a light rare earth ore along with mostly ankerite and biotite as dominant gangue minerals as well as bastnaesite, strontianite and goethite as dominated minerals were exposed to further comminution by ball mill and microwave pretreatment fragmentation. Mineralogical characteristics were analyzed by using a mineral liberation analyzer (MLA). The results indicated that tight association mutually penetrates among dominated minerals in the range size of −300 + 212 μm and −212 + 150 μm and gangue minerals in the form of adjacent type, fine vein type, shell type and packing type. Temperature in the ore samples pre-treated by microwave can rapidly rise to 250 °C with microwave power of 0–1.5 kW and microwave time of 0–2 min. Applying the microwave pretreatment merely reduces the hardness of the ore causing the fracture of rare earth ore, but this does not transform or change the original mineralogy characteristics of the ore samples. On the basis of above study, the liberation value of bastnaesite, strontianite and goethite with microwave pretreatment is greater than with conventional comminution when the liberation class is above 75%. The distribution of particle size of rare earth ore samples is better with microwave pretreatment than with conventional comminution for particle size of 7.4 × 10−5 m. With microwave pretreatment, the theoretical grade–recovery of bastnaesite, strontianite and goethite in the rare earth ore attains better results than with conventional comminution at a given grade.