Project Name:Red Mud Recovery Project in Binzhou,Shandong

Location: Shandong,China
Mineral:Red mud
Capacity:2,000,000t/y
Main Equipment:SLon WHIMS

Processing Technology: Magnetic separation

    Red mud is an industrial solid waste from the extraction of alumina from bauxit, which contains large amount of iron oxide. It’s similar to red clay, hence the name. Because of its high content of chemical alkali, fluorine, aluminum and other impurities, it is difficult to make harmless use of red mud. Experts from all over the world have done a lot of scientific research on the comprehensive utilization of red mud, but this kind of research aren’t going well. The disposal and comprehensive utilization of red mud waste residue has become a worldwide problem. However, with the development of aluminum industry, the amount of red mud discharged from alumina production is increasing day by day, and thus a series of problems caused by stockpiling and disposal arise, results in serious environmental problems.

    There is a plant in Binzhou, Shandong province, whose bauxite is from abroad. The bayer method has always been adopted for extracting alumina concentration, which produces large amounts of red mud with 20% iron content. Before 2010, its tailings used to directly discharging to the tailings pond. This way not only caused great waste of resources, but also increase the pressure of the tailings pond. In order to reduce the heavy pressure of the tailings, and recycle the useful ore minerals as many as possible, SLon put forward a magnetic separation scheme after systematic experiment exploration research at the end of 2009. The mining plant purchased two sets of SLon Wet High Intensity Magnetic Separators(WHIMS) from our company in 2010. Our technological process is to carry out separations twice through coarse-to-fine technique. The installation and commissioning of the machines was completed in July, 2019. The equipment has been in good condition until now. The grade of iron concentrate is about 50.47% and its recovery rate reached 40.19%. The detailed process is shown in the following figure.

    At present, the production of iron concentrate recovering from tailings is more than 500,000 tons every year, which significantly improves the comprehensive utilization rate of secondary resources, and increases considerable economic and social benefits for mining enterprises. The successful application of SLon WHIMS in recovering from red mud is also a meaningful step in the whole mining industry.