Recovery of Rare-Earth Minerals from the Feldspar By-Product

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper was focused on recovering rare-earth minerals from tailing of Boo-yeo feldspar mine using mineral processing technologies. The tailing, that is feldspar by-product, consisted of light minerals, sulfide minerals, heavy minerals and a little rare-earth minerals. In field, gravity concentration was conducted to reject the light minerals from the tailing sample. In laboratory, sulfide minerals were firstly removed from the head sample by bulk flotation with amyl xanthate at pH 4. Magnetic separations were conducted to recover the rare-earth minerals from the concentrate of bulk flotation. The highest grade concentrate for rare-earth minerals were recovered in the range of 5,500~7,000 Gauss. The final concentrate obtained in several stage mineral processing techniques mostly consisted of monazite with 2.65 wt.% yield and contained total rare-earths oxide composition of 53.58 wt.%. Especially, rare-earths oxide composition of the final concentrate was 36 times for CeO2 and 192 times for Y2O3 higher than that of the head sample.