Types of ilmenite and beneficiation process

In nature, ilmenite resources can be divided into two categories: primary ilmenite and sandy ilmenite according to the actual situation.

Primary ilmenite is mostly associated with titanium magnetite and vanadium titanium magnetite, which is characterized by large and concentrated reserves, suitable for large-scale mining, but with large gangue content, low recovery rate, and poor selectivity.

Sandy ilmenite is a secondary ore, which is characterized by loose structure and good selectability, but the grade of the original ore is low and the ore is easy to muddy.

It can be seen that different ilmenite ore characteristics have different requirements for titanium. At present, the common beneficiation methods of ilmenite include gravity separation, magnetic separation, electric separation, flotation and combined method.

The choice of beneficiation method for ilmenite mainly depends on the nature of the material. Since the specific gravity of titanium minerals is larger than that of non-metallic gangue minerals, gravity separation can be used for pretreatment or roughing and tailings, and it can also be enriched for ilmenite with a small proportion of gangue minerals.

The magnetic separation method is widely used in iron removal operations to improve the concentrate grade of ilmenite. The electric separation method is mostly used for the purification operation when the titanium concentrate selected by other processes contains various non-conductive minerals.

Flotation is more suitable for beneficiation of primary ilmenite fine-grained ore. According to the ore properties of ilmenite, the joint beneficiation rule can give full play to the advantages of each, so as to ensure the ideal beneficiation index and economic benefits.