As a light metal, lithium is widely used in industrial production due to its advantages of high toughness, good ductility and good chemical activity. The types of lithium ores currently used in the industrial field include spodumene, lepidolite, lepidolite, iron lepidolite, and lithium feldspar. Because of the different types, the beneficiation process is also different.

The main lithium ore beneficiation methods include: flotation, magnetic separation, dense medium beneficiation and combined beneficiation.

Lithium ore beneficiation equipment

Lithium ore beneficiation process

01 Flotation method

Applicable minerals
Lithium ore with industrial value, especially lithium ore in the form of fine particle dissemination.

main process
Common lithium ore flotation methods include forward flotation and reverse flotation.

Positive flotation
Lithium ore is finely ground (try to avoid over-grinding to cause muddy phenomenon), add strong alkali for flotation, and add oleic acid and soap salt after high concentration in alkaline medium, strong stirring, and repeated scrubbing to remove mud As a collector, the lithium concentrate is directly floated out, leaving gangue minerals in the tank. This process does not need to add inhibitors.

reverse flotation
With the help of the alkaline environment created by lime, starch, dextrin and other substances are added to inhibit the lithium ore from floating up, and at the same time, the cationic collector is used to make the silicate gangue minerals float to the surface of the pulp, and the product in the flotation machine tank is lithium concentrate. mine. If lithium ore contains iron minerals, foaming agents (such as HF, resinate) can be added to further help remove impurities such as iron minerals.

02 Magnetic separation method

Applicable minerals
Spodumene with iron impurities.

main process
Because of the iron-containing impurity minerals in spodumene, these minerals have weak magnetic properties and need to be removed by strong magnetic separation to obtain low-iron spodumene concentrate.

Process characteristics
Simple operation, easy control and strong adaptability.

03 Gravity beneficiation method

Applicable minerals
For spodumene with relatively coarse crystal grain size, the specific gravity difference between lithium ore and gangue minerals is not more than 0.2-0.5g/m3.

main process
Mix the lithium ore after washing and desliming with dense medium (heavy medium has two types: heavy liquid and heavy suspension, here mainly refers to heavy suspension), and feed it into the heavy medium cyclone at a pressure of 0.05-0.20Mpa for separation Otherwise, heavy products and light products can be separated. The heavy product becomes lithium concentrate after being stripped by the stripping sieve, and the light product becomes tailings after stripping off the stripping sieve, and its main components are gangue minerals such as quartz, feldspar, and biotite.

04 Combined beneficiation method

Applicable minerals
Lithium ore with complex associated components.

main process
For lithium ore with complex associated components in nature, it is sometimes difficult to obtain qualified lithium concentrate by a single beneficiation method. In this case, Xinhai Mining adopts a combined process for lithium ore separation, such as: flotation-magnetic separation process , Flotation-re-election-magnetic separation process, flotation-chemical treatment process, etc.

Flotation-Magnetic Separation
Firstly, oxidized paraffin soap and naphthenic acid soap are used as combined collectors, NaOH is used as pH regulator, and a coarse-fine flotation process is adopted in alkaline pulp to obtain spodumene concentrate, which is then subjected to strong magnetic Iron removal is carried out to obtain spodumene concentrate with low iron content.

Flotation - Magnetic Separation - Gravity Separation
After the milled material is slurried, it enters the gravity separation stage (to remove tantalum, niobium and other products). Spodumene concentrate is obtained by conditional flotation, and further purified by strong magnetic separation to remove iron impurities.