Recovery of hematite from iron ore tailings

Goa the largest exporter of Iron Ore In the private sector in India exports about 44 million tons of Iron ore to various Countries. About 25 million tons of ore is beneficiated in the various beneficiation plants in Goa (both dry and wet beneficiation plants). About 14 million tons of crude ore has been fed into various aet beneficiation plants in Goa. The tailing loss in the wet beneficition plants are considerably high amounting to 27% of the material fed. Keeping in view the high tailing loss and in order to recover certain iron ore values from the tailings, the same has been studied for recovery of Hematite Eriez Magnetics, USA had developed a machine called Ferroud Wheel Separator (FWS) which could recover fine Hematite are with Fe 65% from iran ore tailings with Fe 40% - 50% which could be used as Pellet feed. In two stage Hydrocyclone system, the overflow of the primary Hydrocyclone goes to the secondary stage and the overflow of the secondary stage goes out as tailings. In the proposed circuit with F.W.S., the overflow of both the primary and secondary cyclones Kill pass through tertiary cyclones The tertiary cyclones will serve the purpose of dewetering and deslining and it will have a cut point of 10um. The -10um fraction will go as tailings. The underflow of the tertiary stage cyclone will pass through a low intensity magnetic separator so that the magnetic portion can be recovered. The non magnetic portion will pass through the ferrous Wheel Separator The concentrate of the FWS will pass through filters and the filter cake set produced will be the final concentrate. In this paper authors have tried to highlight an the upgradation of the fines/concentrates by the ferrous wheel separating method, in otherwords, they have worked out on the cost benefit analysis on the recovery of fines with high Fe% and low SiO2 + Al2O3 content from the low grade fines (Tailings of the benefication plant) where the recovery from the tailing is around 30%. A number: of tests have been conducted where it shows the recovery of fines will be around 20-30% with 65% Fe content which can be used as pellet feed.