4 Stages of the Quartz Sand Beneficiation Process

Quartz sand is an important industrial mineral material, widely used in glass, ceramics, refractory materials, metallurgy, and rubber. The general process of quartz sand beneficiation includes four stages: preparation, preliminary separation, separation, and deep purification.

The main task of pre-selection preparation is to fully dissociate the quartz sand and achieve the appropriate particle size range to prepare for subsequent operations. The main processes include crushing, grinding, and classification.

Crushing: The commonly used crushing equipment includes jaw crushers and impact crushers. Jaw crushers are mainly used for the coarse crushing of quartz, while impact crushers are used for fine crushing operations.

Grinding: The commonly used grinding equipment for quartz sand is a wet rod mill. The fineness of grinding can be controlled, and over-grinding is not easy to occur, which can achieve better results. Moreover, the rod mill also plays a certain role in scrubbing, and removing some impurities.

Classification: The ground products are classified, and the unqualified materials are returned for further grinding, which can effectively control the particle size of the selected materials and provide suitable conditions for separation operations.

The main purpose of preliminary separation of quartz sand is to remove impurities such as ore slurry generated during the grinding process and the oxide iron film on the surface of quartz sand, to avoid their impact on subsequent separation operations and improve separation indicators. The main processes include washing and desliming, and scrubbing.

Washing and desliming: using hydraulic flushing to remove ore slurry and some clay impurities in quartz sand, the main equipment includes drum screens, desliming hoppers, hydraulic cyclones, etc.

Scrubbing: using mechanical external force and mineral friction to remove impurities such as oxide iron film on the surface of quartz sand, and to crush mineral clusters that have not completely dissociated into single particles. Commonly used equipment includes stirring scrubbers, spiral scrubbers, etc.

Common beneficiation processes for quartz sand include magnetic separation and flotation.

Magnetic separation: Quartz sand is a non-magnetic mineral, but iron-containing minerals such as hematite and brown iron ore are magnetic minerals, which can be removed by magnetic separators. The finer the quartz sand particle size, the better the iron removal effect.

Flotation: This method is commonly used to remove non-magnetic minerals such as mica and feldspar from quartz sand. The flotation of mica and feldspar is generally carried out in an acidic environment, so there is a certain requirement for the corrosion resistance of the equipment.

When conventional beneficiation methods cannot effectively remove impurities deeply immersed or encapsulated in quartz sand, resulting in low purity of quartz sand, methods such as acid leaching and high-temperature roasting can be used for purification.

Acid leaching: Quartz sand is insoluble in acid, but acid can dissolve other impurities and remove impurities that other methods cannot effectively remove. However, acid leaching requires high operation requirements.

High-temperature roasting: Quartz sand is roasted at high temperature by adding chlorine gas, etc., so that the encapsulated impurities rupture, the impurities are exposed, or the deep impurities undergo reaction and transfer to the mineral surface for removal by other methods.

The quartz sand beneficiation process consists of these four stages. But in actual application in the mining field, suitable processes and machines should be selected according to the ore properties, mineral composition, and impregnation characteristics of the quartz sand. You can click to knowthe quartz sand processing plant equipment list.