7 Questions of Mining Industry

There are several basic questions about mining industry. People will have a general idea to mining industry by these questions.

Q1：What is ore dressing?

Ore dressing is taking advantage of the differences of physical and chemistry properties of minerals to separate the valuable mineral from gangue mineral making the valuable mineral concentrate by various dressing equipment.

Q2: What are the purposes of ore dressing?

Ore mined from the ground in general is composed of valuable minerals and gangue with low grade, which cannot be directly smelted and must be processed firstly; the processing removes most of the gangue and harmful ingredients, and enriches valuable minerals to become concentrate for the next step to use. So ore dressing is indispensable.

Q3: What are the common minerals?

Mineral is natural element and natural compound with fixed chemical composition and physical & chemical properties by the natural physical chemical and biological chemical interaction in the earth's crust. It is a part of rock or ore..

Most of minerals are natural compound (Fe3O4, SiO2, PbS, CuFeS2…) except for a few natural elements (Au, Ag, Cu, S, C…)

There are 3500 kinds of known minerals; only& 200 kinds could be processed under present technical lever.

Q4: Which steps in dressing plant?

1. Prepare operation

Crushing, screening, grinding and classifying

2. Beneficiation operation

Gravity separation, flotation, electric separation, etc.

3. Dewatering operation

Concentration, filtration, drying, etc.

Q5 What is the ore grade?

The ore grade is defined by how many valuable components contained in ores, usually expressed as a percent. α is commonly used to denote the grade of raw ore; βis concentrate grade; θis tailing grade. If there are problems in ;beneficiation production, people generally analyze the three grades.

Q6: What the concentrate, tailings, middling mean?

Concentrate is the final product of dressing plant, which removes most of the gangue and impurities and enrich valuable minerals.

Tailings are the last product with low valuable mineral after layers of crushing, grinding and separation.

Middling is intermediate product obtained in classification process. Its valuable content is between concentrate and tailings.

7Q: What are the main methods to dress?

The main methods: gravity separation, floatation, magnetic separation and electric separation