Phosphate Processing | 4 Phosphate Ore Beneficiation Process

Phosphorus is an important mineral raw material. More than 80% of the world's phosphate ore is used to produce phosphate fertilizer, and it can also be used to prepare pure phosphorus.

Commonly used phosphate beneficiation processes include flotation process, gravity separation process, scrubbing and desliming process, and chemical beneficiation process.

Phosphate Flotation Process

Flotation is a very common method in phosphate beneficiation.

Phosphorus minerals and gangue minerals coexist closely, and the embedded particle size is relatively fine, and the flotation process can obtain better flotation index.

Commonly used flotation processes include direct flotation, reverse flotation, and double reverse flotation.

Phosphate Gravity Separation Process

The gravity beneficiation process of phosphate ore is mainly heavy medium beneficiation method.

The heavy medium method uses the difference in density between phosphorus minerals and impurity minerals, and selects a medium whose density is between the two, so that one mineral floats in the medium and the other sinks, so as to achieve the purpose of separation.

Gravity separation has high separation efficiency and low environmental pollution, and can be used as a pre-separation operation to remove most of the gangue to improve the indicators of subsequent separation operations.

Phosphate Scrubbing And Desliming Process

Phosphate ore scrubbing and desliming process is simple, it is a physical beneficiation process, mainly for weathered phosphate ore.

Phosphate ore is scrubbed or ground in water to remove the surface mud and enrich the phosphorus minerals, but the enrichment of the scrubbing method is relatively low.

Phosphate Chemical Beneficiation Process

The chemical beneficiation method of phosphate ore is to remove the gangue minerals, mainly carbonate minerals, in the ore with the aid of the leaching liquid.

The cost of this method is relatively high, and it is only adopted when other beneficiation methods cannot obtain better concentrate indicators.

In addition to the above four methods, phosphate processing technology also includes roasting method, photoelectric sorting method, etc.

But at present, the flotation method is a more effective process for beneficiation of phosphate ore.