What are the separation processes for tungsten and tin ores?

Tungsten and tin are widely used in cutting-edge scientific and technological fields such as modern industry and national defense science and technology. The common resource characteristics of tungsten and tin ores are wide distribution, concentrated reserves, and a large number of co-existing components. The co-existing and associated components mainly include copper, lead, zinc, molybdenum, sulfur, iron, bismuth, silver, niobium, tantalum, and non-metallic arsenic, fluorite, etc.

Tungsten ore and cassiterite are often densely combined with co-existing valuable metal elements. Therefore, multiple mineral processing methods are often used in combination for separation. Tungsten ore and cassiterite are brittle and are prone to over-crushing to produce fine mud during grinding, which is not conducive to the effective recovery of tungsten and tin. Therefore, when selecting the beneficiation process, it is necessary to avoid or reduce the over-crushing phenomenon.

Based on the study of the properties of the original ore, the particle size of the tungsten-tin minerals in the ore is relatively fine, the dissociation degree of the tungsten-tin mineral monomers in the +0.30 mm particle size is low, and the dissociation degree of the tungsten-tin mineral monomers in the -0.30 mm particle size is relatively high. In order to avoid or reduce the over-grinding of tungsten-tin minerals during the grinding process, the pre-grading grinding process is adopted to pre-separate the -0.30 mm particle size product, and the +0.30 mm particle size product is ground to -0.30 mm and then combined with the original ore graded -0.30 mm particle size product for tungsten-tin roughing. The gravity flotation-magnetic combined process is used for tungsten-tin separation, mainly including spiral chute roughing, shaking table selection, flotation desulfurization, magnetic separation, etc.

The rough scavenging of tungsten and tin mainly adopts single gravity separation and magnetic-gravity combination processes for comparison. The single gravity separation adopts spiral chute to pre-enrich tungsten and tin, and at the same time, the comparison test between graded spiral chute and non-graded spiral chute is carried out. The magnetic-gravity combination mainly carries out graded separation, adopts high gradient magnetic separator to select tungsten, and uses magnetic tailings spiral chute to enrich tin.