Ilmenite Beneficiation Process: Technical Paths and Optimization Directions

      As an important industrial mineral, ilmenite beneficiation needs to address challenges such as difficult recovery of fine particles and difficult separation of gangue. With flotation as the core, it combines reagent optimization, process innovation and equipment adaptation to achieve efficient separation.

      The pretreatment stage is based on grinding and classification. By adjusting the grinding fineness to ensure the complete dissociation of ilmenite monomers, the particle size of 80% of the particles is usually controlled to be less than 0.074 mm, creating conditions for subsequent flotation. The core flotation processes include three types: flocculation flotation uses flocculants such as polyacrylamide to form flocs of fine-grained ilmenite, improving floatability; carrier flotation uses coarse-grained minerals as carriers, and the buoyancy of coarse particles drives fine particles to float, with a significant effect when the mass fraction of coarse particles exceeds 50%; the "magnetic separation-flotation" combined process is the most widely used. It first pre-enriches ilmenite through magnetic separation, then performs in-depth impurity removal through flotation, which can increase the recovery rate of ilmenite concentrate to more than 80%, and up to 81.17% in some scenarios.

      The reagent system is the key to flotation: composite collectors, such as sodium oleate and styrene phosphonic acid in a ratio of 3:1, have better collection effects than single reagents; depressants such as water glass and low-molecular-weight carboxylated starch can selectively adsorb on the gangue surface and prevent its interaction with collectors; activators such as Pb²⁺ and Cu²⁺ enhance the adsorption efficiency of collectors by increasing the active sites on the ilmenite surface. In terms of equipment, the GF+JJF flotation machine is suitable for coarse-grained grades, while the cyclonic-static microbubble flotation column significantly improves the separation effect of fine particles, with the concentrate grade reaching 48.21%.

     Future ilmenite beneficiation should focus on the development of environmentally friendly reagents, intelligent control and optimization of fine particle recovery technology to promote green and efficient separation.