5 Processes to Improve Your Manganese Ore Grade

( Manganese ore plant site )

Manganese is an important metal that is widely distributed in nature and is present in almost all kinds of ores and silicate rocks. In practice, manganese and its compounds are widely used in various fields of modern industry, among which the steel industry is one of the most used fields, using up to 90%-95% of manganese. In the steel industry, manganese is mainly used for deoxidation and desulfurization in the steelmaking or ironmaking process, as well as for the manufacture of alloys.

The manganese ores commonly found in nature can be roughly divided into two categories: manganese oxide ores and manganese carbonate ores. Among them, the amount of manganese carbonate ore is large, which can account for about 57% of the total manganese ore.

1 Manganese Oxide Ore

Manganese oxide ore mainly refers to the secondary manganese oxide ore of weathering deposits, in addition, there are also a small amount of primary and secondary manganese oxide ore of sedimentary and hydrothermal deposits.

The manganese minerals in manganese oxide ore are mainly divided into water manganese ore, soft manganese ore and hard manganese ore; the vein minerals can be mainly divided into carbonate minerals and silicate minerals, and are often accompanied with cobalt, phosphorus and raw iron and other components.

2 Manganese Carbonate Ore

Manganese carbonate ore mainly includes rhodochrosite, calcium rhodochrosite, manganese calcite, etc.; vein minerals can be mainly divided into carbonate minerals, and silicate minerals, often accompanied by impurities such as sulfur and iron. Its ore structure is relatively complex, manganese minerals embedded in fine particle size to microns, difficult to dissociate, as well as to obtain high grade concentrate.

1 Washing and Screening Method

Washing is the raw ore under the action of hydraulic, mechanical and self-friction, so that the ore and mud are separated, thereby improving the grade of the ore.

The washing operation is often accompanied by screening, such as washing with water directly on the vibrating screen or sending the sand ore (net ore) obtained from the washing machine to the vibrating screen for screening.

Screening can be used as an independent operation to separate products of different sizes and grades for different purposes.

Commonly used manganese ore washing equipment are washing screen, cylinder washing machine and trough type washing machine. The washing operation is often accompanied by screening, which can be used as an independent operation to separate products of different sizes and grades for different purposes.

Most of the manganese carbonate ore is washed, generally using vibrating screen spraying water. The product on the screen is washed ore, the product under the screen is graded by spiral classifier, and the returned sand is combined with the product on the screen. The overflow is discarded or further recovered manganese.

Manganese oxide ore is generally scrubbed with a stronger double spiral trough type washing machine.

2 Gravity Beneficiation Process Method

The gravity beneficiation process method is only suitable for sorting coarse embedded size, as well as simple structure of manganese ore, especially the density of manganese oxide ore. Commonly used methods are heavy media beneficiation, jigging beneficiation and shaking table beneficiation.

In the treatment of manganese oxide ore by gravity beneficiation process method, the ore is generally crushed to about 6-10mm first, and then sorted. Coarse level with jigger selection, more sawtooth wave type jigger; fine level with shaking table or chute selection, more 6s type shaking table.

Commonly used gravity beneficiation process methods are heavy media beneficiation, jigging beneficiation and shaking bed beneficiation.

#1 Heavy Media Beneficiation Process

Heavy media beneficiation throughout as pre-selection, suitable for sorting manganese carbonate ore and manganese oxide ore, especially for sorting manganese carbonate ore, because its density is small compared with the vein, other gravity beneficiation process methods sorting difficulties. The benefit of heavy media beneficiation is to give the ore size planning wide 75 ~ 2mm, and the sorting accuracy is high. The disadvantage is that the heavy media recovery system is messy and the operational requirements are severe.

#2 Jigging Beneficiation Process

It is mainly used for separating manganese oxide ore, the feed size planning is 30~1mm, the benefit of jigging is high output rate, low equipment capital and operation cost.

#3 Shaking Table Beneficiation Process

The benefit of shaking bed is high sorting efficiency and simple operation, but the disadvantage is low processing capacity of single machine and large floor space.

3 Strong Magnetic Beneficiation Process Method

Manganese minerals are weak magnetic minerals, can be recovered in the strong magnetic field magnetic separator of magnetic field strength, so generally use the strong magnetic separator of manganese ore for its selection, generally can improve the manganese grade 4% ~ 10%.

Because strong magnetic separation is easy to control, simple operation, and strong adaptability, basically can be used in the selection of various manganese ores, so in recent years strong magnetic separation in manganese ore beneficiation has occupied an important position.

At present, the common application is medium grain strong magnetic separator, coarse grain and fine grain strong magnetic separator is also gradually applied.

4 Gravity – Magnetic Beneficiation Process Method

Strong magnetic separation and gravity beneficiation process method combined process, mainly for processing manganese oxide ore.

This kind of manganese ore beneficiation process mainly adopts the combination of gravity beneficiation process and magnetic separation, jigger and strong magnetic separator for joint separation of manganese ore.

The crushed qualified manganese ore is put into the magnetic separator for strong magnetic separation, which can get the weak magnetic separation tailing and strong magnetic manganese concentrate, and the tailing will get the concentrate and tailing after strong magnetic separation, and the concentrate will get the re-elected manganese concentrate and tailing after gravity beneficiation process.

5. Strong Magnetic-Flotation Beneficiation Process Method

The manganese ore beneficiation method combined with strong magnetic separation and flotation method has strong adaptability and is mainly adapted to manganese carbonate ore. The magnetic separator can not only effectively take off the manganese ore sludge, but also improve the flotation entry taste, and the manganese concentrate products can be obtained directly after desulfurization.

In the grinding process, rod mill and ball mill are the main equipment, strong magnetic selection of manganese ore strong magnetic separation equipment, flotation equipment can be used in the inflatable flotation machine.

Notes

For manganese ore, the particle size of the raw ore is large, generally in the process of beneficiation, the particle size of the ore is too coarse or too fine to carry out the effective separation of minerals, so that when the manganese ore is beneficiated, the taste of the concentrate is not high enough and the quality of the finished product is seriously affected, so the crushing equipment or crushing process is beneficial to the separation of minerals in the manganese ore beneficiation production line.

For the manganese ore handled by the mineral processing investor, most of them are in the state that useful minerals and vein minerals are closely linked together, while they often become fine grained or even fine-grained embedded, which is not good for direct beneficiation processing at all, and only when these minerals are crushed and fully dissociated, they can be enriched and the concentrate selected by the existing beneficiation process method. Therefore, the crushing process plays the role of mineral enrichment in the manganese ore beneficiation production line.

In this paper, we have mainly talked about 2 classifications of manganese ore and 5 main beneficiation processes and methods. In the actual application of the beneficiation plant, we should consider the nature of the ore and other factors to design the most suitable beneficiation process and method.