Physical and Chemical Beneficiation of the Egyptian Beach Monazite

Abstract

The Egyptian black sands contain several economic minerals, especially ilmenite. Monazite can reach concentrations up to 0.6 wt.%. The majority of monazite grains have light to deep canary and lemon yellow colors, whereas enigmatic monazite grains have brown, red, resinous, yellow and colorless to pinkish colors. The behavior of monazite with the electrostatic field setting of the roll-type electrostatic separator was studied for the different variables of the separator. Most of the monazite grains are reversible negative and are attracted towards the positively charged static electrode. Using wet gravity concentration, both low and high intensity magnetic separation, and electrostatic separation techniques, a high grade concentrate assaying 97 wt. % monazite with a recovery of 76.8% can be obtained.The Egyptian beach monazite contains high concentrations of Ce, La and Nd in addition to minor amounts of Y, Pr, Sm, Gd, Dy and Eu. It is particularly rich in the lighter rare earth elements (cerium subgroup). By a new method of ion exchange technique after chemically dissolving the mineral with sulfuric acid, both of REEs, Th and U, could be individually separated. The efficiency of the separation has been tested with sulfuric acid concentration at 2M H 2SO4 where the thorium and uranium could be obtained with a cation exchange synthetic resin column, while rare earth metal ions are adsorbed and then individually separated. A highly pure thorium product could be obtained by oxalate precipitation followed by uranium precipitation as diuranate using NaOH.

Process development to recover rare earth metals from monazite mineral: A review

“…When xenotime (much more paramagnetic than monazite) is concentrated with ilmenite after magnetic separation of heavy mineral sands it may be removed from the ilmenite via electrostatic separation, as ilmenite is conductive but xenotime is not (Jordens et al, 2013). The behavior of Egyptian beach monazite with the electrostatic field setting of the roll-type electrostatic separator was studied (Moustafa and Abdelfattah, 2010). But the requirement of completely dry feed material is the major drawback of this technique preventing it to be applied on industrial scale.…”

“…Wet gravity separation was used initially to discard low specific gravity gangue and then low intensity magnetic separation to discard any ferromagnetic minerals without removing paramagnetic monazite. A chain of gravity, magnetic and electrostatic separations were further applied where rutile was removed after electrostatic separation followed by the removal of diamagnetic zircon from the paramagnetic monazite by magnetic separation to exploit different properties of the monazite, zircon and rutile minerals and produce the final concentrate (Moustafa and Abdelfattah, 2010 reported where gravity separation process via a shaking table was used to remove quartz and feldspar. Further, Mitchell and Yusof used carpco high intensity induced-roll magnetic separator to obtain magnetic and non-magnetic products.…”

A Review of the Occurrence and Promising Recovery Methods of Rare Earth Elements from Coal and Coal By-Products

“…Rare earth elements (REEs) are a group of 15 lanthanide elements (atomic numbers [57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71] and two transition metal elements (scandium and yttrium) [1][2][3]. Promethium (Atomic Number 61) is extremely rare and is generally considered not to exist in nature [2,4].…”

Investigation of Sorption and Separation of Lanthanides on the Ion Exchangers of Various Types

“…The lanthanide elements traditionally have been divided into two groups: the light rare earth elements group (LREEs) which contains elements from lanthanum to europium (Z from 57 to 63) and the heavy rare earth elements group (HREEs) which contains elements from gadolinium to lutetium (Z from 64 to 71). Although yttrium is the lightest rare earth element, it is usually grouped with the HREEs to which it is chemically and physically similar (Kumar, 1994;Robards et al 1998;Moustafa & Abdelfattah, 2010).…”