Recovery of Ultra-Fine Iron Ore from Iron Ore Tailings

Abstract

Many attempts has been taken for further utilisation of the tailings and slimes through different routes i.e. beneficiation, agglomeration etc. Though the slimes and tailings contain huge ultra fines, conventional beneficiation methods many not be much effective for handling because of particle size limitations. Physicochemical method i.e. selective flocculation is a process for handling the ultrafine particles present in the tailings. Review shows that selective flocculation technique have very limited commercial application. Here the study focuses on the application of selective flocculation process for beneficiation of synthetic mixtures of iron ore and kaolinite as well as iron ore tailings. Results show that it is possible to achieve 65.78(%) of Fe, with 2.65% Al2O3, 3.66 SiO2 (%) in the concentrate using synthetic mixture feed and more than 60% of Fe is obtained from natural iron ore tailings.