Recovery of Placer Industrial Minerals from Red Sediments of Badlands Topography and Its Value Addition

Abstract

Red sediments of Badlands topography are a typical recent deposit containing valuable Industrial Minerals. These minerals include titanium bearing minerals, zircon, monazite, and sillimanite. Garnet is free from these red sediments and quartz is present as gangue mineral. At first instance recovery of individual industrial heavy minerals is made by desliming the sample followed by spiral concentrator to reject the quartz minerals. The heavy minerals sand subjected to wet magnetic separation where ilmenite and monazite are recovered as magnetic minerals. These magnetic minerals further subjected to dry electromagnetic separator to recover ilmenite as conducting mineral and monazite as non conducting mineral. The grades of these minerals are around 98-99%. The non-magnetic minerals are again subjected to gravity separator using wet gravity tables to reject the excess of quartz present in the non-magnetic fraction. The non-magnetic heavy minerals contain sillimanite, rutile, and zircon. Sillimanite was recovered by flotation. The flotation tailings contain zircon and rutile which were separated by electrical conducting separation where rutile as conducting fraction and the zircon as non conducting fraction. The grades of these minerals are around 98-99%. Recoveries of individual mineral flowsheets with mass balance are presented in the present investigation. Except monazite, all minerals are characterized. The value addition process of ilmenite to titania and iron slag by microwave heating source, sillimanite to mullite using microwave heat energy and zircon grindability using planetary mill are presented here.