Lithium Batteries Are Popular, How To Get Lithium Resources?

In today's automobile market, traditional fuel vehicles are declining day by day, and the development of new energy vehicles has entered the fast lane. As the lifeline of new energy vehicles, lithium batteries have also risen in status, and lithium resources have also been greatly sought after. Lithium resources can be extracted from lithium ore. The three most important ores for producing lithium are spodumene, lepidolite and petalite. The main beneficiation methods of lithium ore are manual selection, flotation and chemical or Chemical _ flotation combined method.

Lithium Ore Hand Selection

Hand selection was one of the main beneficiation methods for lithium ore in the 1950s and 1960s, and was mainly used for spodumene, a mineral with large crystals. Spodumene with a particle size larger than 3 cm and an ore grade of 2%-3% or more is suitable for hand selection, and the tailings after hand selection still have the value of machine selection. Manual selection has high labor intensity, low sorting indicators and low production efficiency, and is gradually being replaced by mechanical beneficiation methods.

Lithium Ore Flotation

The research and application of flotation is earlier, and flotation has been used in the industrial production of spodumene in the 1930s.

Due to weathering pollution and sludge pollution, the surface of spodumene will destroy its flotability, resulting in unsatisfactory flotation results. Therefore, desliming and alkali treatment should be carried out before flotation.

Coarse-grained lepidolite is often enriched by hand or wind separation, while fine-grained lepidolite is recovered by flotation. Lepidolite will be inhibited by some aluminum salts, iron salts, sodium sulfide, etc. in the slurry, so the lepidolite should be activated before flotation.

Calcium chloride can play the role of activating petalite, and can improve its recovery rate in neutral medium and alkaline medium.

Lithium Ore Chemistry or Chemistry_Flotation Combined

This method is suitable for extracting lithium salts from salt lake lithium mines. The general process is to evaporate the brine on the drying field to precipitate sodium and potassium salts, so that the concentration of lithium chloride can reach about 6%. After that, lithium chloride enters the factory and is converted into a solid product of lithium carbonate with the help of the soda method.

The beneficiation methods for extracting lithium from lithium ore are not limited to the above three methods. Usually, a combined process of common flotation, magnetic separation, gravity separation and chemical treatment is adopted according to the composition and properties of the lithium deposit.