Grade improvement of iron ore concentrate by applying plant audits, standardization and process optimization

One of the challenges at iron ore processing plants is achieving a concentrate by the desirable iron grade. It is crucial to implement optimizations for increasing the concentrate quality. In this research, the operation of a case study plant was investigated to find bottlenecks and improve the iron ore concentrate quality. For this purpose, the grinding and magnetic separation stages including ball mills, hydrocyclones and low intensity magnetic separators were investigated. The plant optimizations resulted in the Fe grade improvement of concentrate from 63.50% to 66.1% and reduction of concentrate particle size (P80) from 98 µm to 75 µm.