Mineralogical and Chemical Characterization of Low Grade Iron Ore Fines from Barsua Area, Eastern India with Implications on Beneficiation and Waste Utilization

Abstract

The consumption of iron ore has increased rapidly over the past decade due to the tremendous growth of iron and steel industry. The depletion of high grade iron ore resources make it inevitable to utilize the existing low grade iron ores/ fines/ tailings with effective beneficiation to meet the present specification and demand. Enormous amounts of fines are produced both from the natural geological process as well during the mechanized mining operations which is hitherto in unknown resource present in the form of waste. Beneficiation and utilization of these fines/tailings still remains a challenging task. In order to find out the effective way of utilization of these fines, an in-depth characterization study is essential. A detailed insight into the different mineralogical attributes involving microscopic SEM-EDX, EPMA, XRD, FTIR, TGA, physical and chemical characterization are undertaken on the Barsua iron ores fines. These studies revealed that hematite and goethite are the major iron bearing minerals with gibbsite, kaolinite and quartz present as gangue that makes up the deleterious Al and Si content. Traces of magnetite is also observed along with martite. The liberation size of the sample is found to be below 150 μm. The bulk chemical composition shows around 57.67% Fe, 6.29% Al2O3, 3.52% SiO2 and 6.93% LOI. Based on the detailed characterization, possible routes of beneficiation of the iron ore fines are discussed.

Mineralogical Characterization Applied to Iron Ore Tailings from the Desliming Stage with Emphasis on Quantitative Electron Microscopy (Qem)

“…The sample was embedded in epoxy resin, in the form of 30mm diameter tablets, polished and covered with carbon film, and the analysis time for each tablet was in average of 90 minutes. The scanned volume corresponds to 6250000µm 3 , with the volume of the phases equal to 2389776µm 3 and classified volume of 95.69%.…”

“…However, the gradual depletion of high-grade iron ore deposits, leads to a critical scenario in the mining industry, encouraging the use of low-iron ore, process fines and, above all, tailings generated in the mineral processing 3 .…”

“…It is important to note that each deposit has unique mineralogical characteristics, thus requiring a specific type of processing to obtain each product. The choice of beneficiation stages depends on the nature of the gangue present in the ore and its association with the mineral of economic value, so it is necessary to carry out a geometallurgical study, combining different characterization techniques, which will allow a better perception of the different characteristics mineralogical properties of the ore and its influence on the processing of generated tailings 3,5,6 .…”

“…Previously presented works 3,6,9 , demonstrated that the combined study of different characterization techniques, addressed by physical, chemical and mineralogical characterization tests, offers a better perception of the different mineralogical attributes of iron ore and its relationship with the processing steps 6 . From the results generated, it is possible to discuss and propose different processing methods, leading to changes in the processing steps already used.…”

Watershed Management of Joda-Barbil Mining Area, Odisha, India: A Geospatial Approach

“…To enhance productivity of the area from the shrinking and skinned land resources to arrest forest degradation, and waste disposal it is imperative to adopt best watershed management strategies. For meeting these needs, a comprehensive study on watershed and hydrological parameters with special reference to mining area is indispensable [15,16,17]. The data were collected from the USGS websites, which is an open source for data collection such as SRTM and CARTO DEM (30 m spatial resolution).…”