2014-Sustainable Industrial Processing Summit
SIPS 2014 Volume 2: Mineral Processing
| Editors: | Kongoli F |
| Publisher: | Flogen Star OUTREACH |
| Publication Year: | 2014 |
| Pages: | 446 pages |
| ISBN: | 978-1-987820-04-1 |
| ISSN: | 2291-1227 (Metals and Materials Processing in a Clean Environment Series) |
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A Novel Biopolymer for Improve Iron Ores Flotation Process Sustainability
Marcelo Costa1;1KEMIRA, Barueri, Brazil;
Type of Paper: Regular
Id Paper: 72
Topic: 2
Abstract:
In order to meet the specifications of the blast furnace process for steel production regarding trace elements content, upgrading steps can be required. Flotation has become increasingly important to process intermediate- and low-grade iron ore in an attempt to harmonize iron ore high-grade exhaustion and market demand of production in Brazilian sites.
Following the Brazilian production expectation by 2020, the amount of flotation chemical will rise significantly. From a sustainable point of view, starch could have an issue of concern related to the availability, where industrial application for flotation process and the growth of population demand the same raw material.
The scope of the present work is to develop a depressant with better selectivity than starch to achieve an upgraded pellet feed product from intermediate- and low-grade iron ores. A synthetic biopolymer, called XMC, was developed out of the food and feed chain with better selectivity index than starch. Therefore, the present investigation deals with the objective of increasing metallic recovery values by improving the process of reverse cationic flotation selectivity at competitive cost. For that, two different underflow iron ore samples after desliming stage were evaluated.
Results show that at the same SiO2 level (about 1%), new biopolymer was able to foster a completive cost/benefit compared to the starch application on the cationic reverse flotation. The approached strategies were: a) increasing the metallic recovery and b) decreasing the SiO2 content for intermediate- and low-grade iron ore. For both iron ore samples, it was demonstrated that XMC requires significantly lower collector dosages than starch to achieve SiO2 values below 1% in the concentrate. This new depressant is an option for cleaning iron ore concentrates aiming at the production of concentrate products with SiO2 < 1%. Furthermore, friendly made down and application with lower Capex/Opex were expected, since XMC is already in gel form.