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Tin metal, due to its unique physical and chemical properties, such as low melting point, excellent ductility, corrosion resistance and non-toxicity, plays a vital role in modern industry. It is widely used in many fields such as electronics, chemical industry, food container manufacturing and defense industry. Despite the wide application of tin, tin ores in nature often contain a variety of associated minerals, the presence of which makes it complicated to extract pure tin directly from the ore. Therefore, in order to effectively separate and extract metallic tin from the ore, a series of sophisticated mineral processing technologies must be adopted, including gravity separation, flotation and magnetic separation.
The gravity separation process is based on the density difference between tin ore and gangue, and the separation is achieved through the difference in settling velocity in the medium. This process is particularly suitable for processing coarse and medium-sized tin ores. In the roughing stage, a jig is usually used for pre-selection and tailing, and the pulsating water flow is used to promote the stratification of minerals according to specific gravity, thereby achieving efficient separation. For fine-grained tin ore, the shaking table becomes an effective tool for selection. It relies on the asymmetric reciprocating motion of the bed surface and water flushing to achieve high-precision mineral separation, which is especially suitable for recovering fine-grained cassiterite in cassiterite-quartz type ores. Overall, the beneficiation process of tin ore needs to be flexibly adjusted according to actual conditions to ensure efficient recovery of tin resources.
When the cassiterite particle size is refined to below 19 microns, the efficiency of gravity separation will be limited, and flotation becomes a better choice. In the flotation process of cassiterite, the key lies in selecting a suitable collector, adjusting the pH value of the slurry, and inhibiting associated minerals. Commonly used collectors include oleic acid, toluene arsenic acid and salicylic hydroxamic acid, while adjusters commonly use sodium hydroxide, sodium carbonate and sulfuric acid. By accurately controlling the pH value and selectively adding inhibitors such as sodium silicate and sodium hexametaphosphate, the concentrate grade and recovery rate of cassiterite flotation can be significantly improved.
In some cases, tin ore may be associated with complex minerals such as iron oxide minerals (such as magnetite, hematite, limonite) or tungsten ore, which makes it difficult to achieve the desired separation effect by flotation and gravity separation alone. At this time, magnetic separation is particularly important. According to the characteristics of different tin ores, dry or wet magnetic separation processes can be selected. For example, when the associated mineral is tungsten ore, dry magnetic separation can be used to separate wolframite, scheelite and cassiterite, and then cassiterite and scheelite can be further separated by electrostatic separation. If the associated mineral is iron oxide, wet high-intensity magnetic separation is usually used. This process is widely used in the pretreatment of raw ore, sub-concentrate and concentrate to effectively separate tin and iron.
Given the wide application of tin, it is crucial to ensure that the expected beneficiation effect of tin ore can be achieved after it is put into production. To this end, conducting tin ore beneficiation tests is an indispensable step, and the test results will guide the determination of specific process flow and equipment configuration. Through this process, not only the mineral processing efficiency can be optimized, but also the recovery rate of tin metal can be improved, ensuring that tin ore processing is both economical and efficient and meets the high standards of industrial production for tin materials.
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