Overview of phosphate ore purification process

Phosphorus is an important mineral raw material. More than 80% of the world's phosphate ore is used to produce phosphate fertilizers. It can also be used to produce pure phosphorus. There are few rich phosphate ore resources and many poor phosphate ore resources. Most phosphate ore needs to be processed before it can be used. Common phosphate ore beneficiation methods include flotation, gravity separation, scrubbing and desludging, chemical beneficiation, etc.

1 Phosphate ore flotation method

Flotation is a very common method in phosphate ore beneficiation. my country's phosphate ore is generally of low grade, and phosphate minerals and gangue minerals are closely symbiotic, with fine embedded particle size. Flotation can obtain better flotation indicators. Commonly used flotation processes include direct flotation, reverse flotation, double reverse flotation, etc.

2 Phosphate ore gravity separation method

The phosphate ore gravity separation process is mainly a heavy medium separation method. It uses the different densities of phosphate minerals and impurity minerals to select a medium with a density between the two, so that one mineral floats in the medium and the other sinks to achieve the purpose of separation. The gravity separation method has high separation efficiency and low environmental pollution. It can be used as a pre-selection operation to remove most of the gangue to improve the indicators of subsequent separation operations.

3 Phosphate ore scrubbing and desludging method

The phosphate ore scrubbing and desludging method is simple in process and is a physical ore dressing method. It is mainly aimed at weathered phosphate ore. The ore is scrubbed or ground in water to remove the surface mud and enrich the phosphate minerals. However, the enrichment of the scrubbing method is relatively low.

4 Phosphate ore chemical ore dressing method

The phosphate ore chemical ore dressing method uses a reagent leaching solution to remove the gangue minerals in the ore, mainly carbonate minerals, but this method is expensive and is only used when other ore dressing methods cannot obtain good concentrate indicators.

In addition to the above four methods, there are other phosphate ore beneficiation processes such as roasting and photoelectric sorting. However, at present, flotation is still a more effective phosphate ore beneficiation method.