Gravity Separation Technology of Barite

2015/12/15  Bmschem

      Barite, whose ingredient is barium sulfate, is the most common minals of barium. It occurs in low temperature hydrothermal vein, such as quartz-barite vein, fluorite-barite vein…, often symbiosis with galena, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, cinnabar and so on. Because of its high specific gravity, we usually make use of the specific differences with gangue to do mineral separation.
      To select barite by gravity separation process has advantage of large grain size, wide size, big treatment capacity and so on. Gravity separation dominates in barite mineral processing. Using Gravity separation to purify and process barite ore has advantage of high efficiency, energy saving, environmental protection and so on. Ideal mineral processing index can be obtained at the same time. It has excellent effect in recycling and disposing coarse and fine barites. Gravity seperation technology has become the core method in rising barite dressing mills. 
      Barite mineral processing flowsheet: barite raw ores go through ore washing- screening– crushing- classification desliming and jigging process. Then better quality concentrates are obtained, whose grade is over 88%. We usually use Jaw crusher or impact crusher to crush barites, while we often use roll crusher to comminute. At the same time, we also can use heavy medium drum sorting machine, cone classifier, table, screw conveyor and so on for grading. The disseminated particle size of barite is over 2mm, so we usually use dense medium separation and jigging separation. The maximum particle size for dense medium separation is 50mm, for dry and wet jigging is about 20mm. If disseminated particle size is less than 2mm, we should use table or spiral classifier to separate. Before concentration, we must use hydrocyclone to remove pug and improve beneficiation effect. The washbox can effectively separate coarse, medium and fine barite ores and its beneficiation result is ideal. In this way, the proportion of barite is effectively improved and we can use circulating water to operate. This mineral processing does not use chemicals and does no harms to environment. It is a new-type, efficient, energy saving and environmental barite beneficiation method.
    At present, barite is generally used as white pigment (commonly known as lithopone). It is also used as chemical, papermaking and textile filler. In glass production, it acts as a flux to increase the brightness of glasses. But it is mainly used as weighting agent in the drilling industry and in refining barium.