Wolframite Processing | 5 Tungsten Extraction Processes

Wolframite is the most important ore for refining tungsten metal.

Metal tungsten has excellent physical, mechanical and chemical properties, so it is widely used in many industries.

The wolframite processing process mainly includes five stages: roughing, grinding, gravity separation, beneficiation and fine slime treatment.

Wolframite Roughing Process

The roughing method of wolframite is generally manual sorting, which is a simple method of pre-enriching wolframite, and is also a necessary operation in the process of wolframite beneficiation.

Because wolframite and gangue minerals are quite different in color, shape, etc., it is easier to manually sort large pieces of wolframite from raw ore.

Wolframite Grinding Process

Metal tungsten is brittle and has a large specific gravity, so it is easy to cause overgrinding during the grinding process, resulting in excessive fine mud.

Gravity separation has limitations on the recovery of fine-grained materials, so grinding in tungsten ore processing is particularly important.

Rod mills are often used in wolframite grinding operations. On the one hand, over-grinding can be avoided. On the other hand, the particle size of the grinding products is relatively uniform, which meets the separation particle size requirements of the gravity separation process.

The grinding process generally adopts one-stage grinding, one-stage rod grinding + medium ore grinding, and two-stage grinding.

Wolframite Gravity Separation Process

(1) wolframite jig sorting

The principle of wolframite separation is "early collection and quick collection", and the coarse concentrate is obtained by multi-stage jigging and sent to the selection operation.

Wolframite jig classification generally adopts three-stage jigging, which is to screen all qualified ores into three grades of coarse, medium and fine to enter the jigging operation.

The coarse and medium jig tailings are re-grinded and beneficiated again, and the fine-grained jig tailings are hydraulically classified into the shaking table for sorting, and the tailings are discarded in the shaking table operation.

(2) wolframite shaking table sorting

Shaking table is one of the most common gravity separation equipment used in the separation of medium and fine-grained ores.

Shaking table are often used as featured equipment in large concentrators, and can be directly used as coarse and featured equipment in small concentrators.

The advantage of the shaking table is that the enrichment ratio is high, and high-grade concentrate can be obtained after one separation and the tailings can be discarded, and multiple products can be received at the same time. The disadvantage is the low processing power and the large footprint.

Wolframite Concentration Process

After wolframite has been selected by gravity separation, there are still some useful metals with higher value, so it is necessary to select the coarse concentrate by gravity separation. The selection methods mainly include magnetic separation method and table flotation method.

Magnetic separation generally chooses a dry magnetic separator, so the coarse concentrate needs to be dried before magnetic separation.

Table flotation method is an important sorting method for wolframite selection, and it is a method of simultaneously performing gravity separation and flotation on the same equipment (shaker).

Wolframite Fine Slime Treatment Process

After the wolframite fine sludge is concentrated by the thickener, one or several beneficiation processes are adopted to recover or comprehensively utilize the useful minerals in the sludge according to the material components and properties of the sludge.