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Spodumene, a lithium aluminum silicate mineral, usually contains traces of sodium, calcium, magnesium, and occasionally chromium, rare earths, and cesium.
Spodumene has excellent thermal stability and is an important raw material for glass-ceramics and frit glazes. As a lithium chemical material, it is widely used in lithium chemical, glass, ceramics and other industries, and enjoys the reputation of "industrial monosodium glutamate".
Spodumene is an excellent ore source for extracting lithium. Lithium, as a new energy metal in the 21st century, has been pushed to a new peak, driving the mining and processing of spodumene.
The demand for spodumene presents a phenomenon of tight market supply, and lithium prices continue to rise. Taking lithium carbonate as an example, battery-grade lithium carbonate is used to prepare lithium-ion battery cathode materials.
According to the mineral characteristics of spodumene, the processing steps of spodumene are: crushing and screening, grinding and grading, flotation and magnetic separation, concentration and drying, and tailings treatment.
According to the principle of "more crushing and less grinding", the processing of spodumene adopts a three-stage closed-circuit crushing process. The broken particle size is controlled below 15mm.
Jaw Crusher: The raw ore enters the Jaw Crusher through the feeder for coarse crushing.
Cone Crusher: The coarse ore is sent to the cone crusher through the belt conveyor for fine crushing.
Circular vibrating sieve: The pulverized spodumene enters the circular vibrating sieve for screening.
After screening, qualified spodumene minerals enter the grinding and grading process. The particle size of spodumene ore is ground to less than 0.15mm for better flotation effect.
Wet ball mill: The ore under the sieve is sent to the wet grid ball mill for grinding.
Spiral classifier: The pulp in the pump box enters the spiral classifier for classification.
The gangue mineral spodumene includes feldspar, quartz, muscovite, chlorite, hornblende and so on. Flotation-magnetic separation is the main application method of spodumene beneficiation, which adopts the technological process of primary roughing and secondary beneficiation.
Agitation tank: The slurry flows into the agitation tank. Add oleic acid and oxidized paraffin soap to slurp.
Flotation machine: enter the flotation machine, and float the spodumene concentrate under the condition of high alkalinity.
Magnetic separator: further remove iron and purify through magnetic separation to obtain low-iron lithium concentrate.
After the spodumene mineral is separated, it contains a lot of water and must be dried by a drying system.
Thickener: Preliminary thickening is carried out in the thickener to remove a large amount of water.
Tumble Dryer: The wet concentrate is then dried to obtain dry spodumene concentrate.
Spodumene is mainly associated with feldspar, and the content of feldspar is high. In order to improve the concentrate recovery rate, the separated tailings can be scavenged. Feldspar concentrate is often obtained by magnetic separation.
However, the spodumene tailings contain impurities such as mica flakes, so the high-frequency vibrating screen can be installed before the strong magnetic separator. It can not only improve the iron removal effect, but also prevent the medium box of the magnetic separator from being blocked.
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