A Review Of The State Of The Arts And Progress In Separating Minerals Using Air Dense Medium Fluidisation With Two Other Enhancement Techniques; Vibration And Magnetic Field

Abstract

In general, the valuable minerals are recovered mostly by wet separations in industrial practices, including froth flotation, cyclone, wet jigging for fine particulate ore. However, these techniques require large amounts of water. In addition, they are unsuitable for some minerals, such as some types of coals in cold regions that tend to form slime in a wet separation process. Therefore, several scientists and engineers have been investigating and developing dry separation techniques to replace the commonly used wet separations (Tang, 2017). In this research, the published literature has been reviewed to understand the state of the art of gas fluidisation in mineral separation using air dense medium fluidisation (ADMFB), vibrated dense medium fluidised beds (VDMFB) and magnetically stabilised fluidised beds (MSFB). It was found that ADMFB separators are most suitable for large particles, VDMFBs separators are best for medium size rang, and MSFB separators can handle fine coal particles. In addition, the lowest separation limit of fine coal particles using those mentioned above was one millimetre.