Abstract
The black sand magnetite is a raw material to produce iron and steel. High content magnetite in the top meter beach sands of the north-west of El-Burullus Lake of Egypt is separated and mineralogically and geochemically investigated. Magnetite content obtained by laboratory techniques varies between 2.92 and 0.11 wt%, with 1.15 wt% average. It represents about one third of the total economic heavy mineral (31.6 wt%). The western and northern halves of the study area are richer in magnetite content (1.33–1.51 wt%) than the eastern and southern halves (0.80–0.98 wt%). On the other hand, the average value of magnetite obtained by ore dressing techniques is 1.13 wt% with a recovery of 98.3 wt%. About 306 samples at a 1-m depth of a grid pattern 200 m × 200 m nearly parallel and perpendicular to the shoreline were covered the area. Microscopic study shows that the magnetite concentrate occurs as irregular, octahedral, or abnormal spherical grains and represented either by fresh homogeneous black or heterogeneous exsolved grains with ilmenite. XRD data indicate that the sample is composed mainly of magnetite grains. Grain size distribution suggests a very fine sand size modal class of more than 93 wt% of the particles. The fine sand size class contains 5.21 wt% magnetite grains. The abnormal spherical grains are mostly more coarser than the associated magnetite concentrate, so they are easily concentrated by sieving process. The contents of iron oxide and titanium dioxide of octahedral magnetite vary from 73.3 to 91.5 and 2.0 to 16.0 wt%, with 85 and 6.0 wt% averages, respectively. On the other hand, these contents of the abnormal spherical one are variable from 81.4 to 95.6 wt%, with 90.3 wt% averages for iron oxide and from 0.3 to 4.0 wt%, with 1.3 wt% average for titanium dioxide. The tonnage of magnetite using laboratory and ore dressing techniques is 182,850 and 179,670 t, respectively. The chemical data of the investigated magnetite suggest their basic volcanic rock origin of the Blue Nile provenance and can be considered as a good indicator for the volcanic source of the Ethiopian plateau.
Highlights
The Egyptian black sand extends along the beaches of the northern parts of the Nile Delta especially at Rosetta and Damietta
The mineralogy and chemistry of six economic heavy minerals along the northern coast of Egypt were recently studied by Abdel-Karim et al (2016)
Due to there is no detailed previous work, the authors believe that this paper presents, for the first time, separation and mineralogy of placer magnetite of Egypt
Summary
The Egyptian black sand extends along the beaches of the northern parts of the Nile Delta especially at Rosetta and Damietta. The Egyptian beach magnetite occurs as a relatively high content in naturally highly concentrated surfaced black sand at definite beach zones characteristic by severe erosion. It is considered as the second economic abundant mineral of the seven essential more abundant minerals: ilmenite, leucoxene, garnet, zircon, rutile, and monazite from the black sands deposited at Rosetta and Damietta (Fig. 1). Hammoud (1966) concluded that the black sand magnetite has low grade in iron and steel production due to their impurity contents especially chromium and vanadium. On the other hand, Nofal et al (1980) studied the beneficiation of the black sand titanomagnetite and proved its suitability for iron and steel
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