Quartz Sand Beneficiation Process | How To Purify Quartz Sand

Quartz sand is an important industrial mineral raw material, which is widely used in glass, ceramics, fireproof materials, metallurgy, rubber and other industries.

The quartz sand beneficiation process is generally divided into four stages: beneficiation preparation, pre-processing, processing and deep purification.

Quartz Sand Beneficiation Preparation

The preparatory work before beneficiation is mainly to fully dissociate the quartz sand to reach a suitable particle size range, so as to prepare for the subsequent operations.

The main processes are crushing, grinding, classification, etc.

Crushing: Commonly used crushing equipment includes jaw crusher and impact crusher. The jaw crusher is mainly used for coarse crushing of quartz, and the impact crusher is used for fine crushing.

Grinding: The commonly used grinding equipment for quartz sand is wet rod mill. Its grinding fineness is controllable, it is not easy to over-grind, and the effect is better. Moreover, the rod mill also plays a scrubbing role to a certain extent to remove some impurities.

Classification: classify the grinding products, and return the unqualified materials for regrinding, which can well control the particle size of the beneficiation materials and provide good conditions for the sorting operation.

Quartz Sand Pre-processing

The main purpose of pre-processing of quartz sand is to remove impurities such as slime and iron oxide film on the surface of quartz sand, so as to avoid their influence on subsequent beneficiation operations and improve the selection index.

The main processes of quartz sand pre-processing include washing desliming and scrubbing.

washing desliming: remove mud and some clay impurities in quartz sand by hydraulic flushing. The main equipments are trommel screen, desliming bucket, hydrocyclone, etc.

scrubbing: Remove impurities such as iron oxide film on the surface of quartz sand by means of mechanical external force and friction between minerals, and scrape the mineral clusters that are not completely dissociated. Commonly used equipment includes agitation scrubbers, spiral scrubbers, etc.

Quartz Sand Processing

Common quartz sand beneficiation processes include magnetic separation and flotation.

Magnetic separation: Quartz sand is a non-magnetic mineral, but iron-bearing minerals such as hematite and limonite are magnetic minerals, which can be removed with a magnetic separator. The finer the particle size of quartz sand, the better the iron removal effect.

Flotation: It is often used to remove non-magnetic minerals such as mica and feldspar in quartz sand. The removal of mica and feldspar by flotation is generally carried out in an acidic environment, so there are certain requirements for the anti-corrosion of the equipment.

Quartz Sand Depth Purification

When the conventional sorting method cannot effectively remove the impurities that are deeply infiltrated or encapsulated in the quartz sand, resulting in a low purity of the quartz sand, acid leaching, high temperature roasting and other methods can be adopted for quartz sand purification.

Acid leaching method: Quartz sand is insoluble in acid, but acid can dissolve other impurities, and can remove impurities that cannot be effectively removed by other methods, but the acid leaching method has relatively high requirements on operation.

High temperature roasting: Quartz sand is roasted at high temperature by adding chlorine gas, etc., to destroy the inclusions, expose impurities, or make the deep impurities react and transfer to the mineral surface, and then adopt other methods to remove impurities.

The quartz sand beneficiation process is roughly divided into these four stages.

However, in practical application, appropriate techniques and processes should be selected according to the ore properties, mineral composition and dissemination characteristics of quartz sand.