Technical advantages of alternative process flowsheets for Itakpe iron ore

Every mineral processing plant flowsheet is selected from several possible alternatives because an ore may be processed using a number of recovery techniques. The flowsheet that is finally selected must have certain technical or economic advantages over the others. In a redesign process of the Nigerian Iron Ore mining Company (NIOMCO) processing plant, Itakpe, five design options (described here as New Design Options A, B and C and Improved Existing Plant Options A and B) were developed as alternatives to the existing plant. Concentrates’ properties, recovery ratio or efficiency and efficiency ratio are the technical parameters used as measure of plant performance. The properties analyzed for comparism include iron mineral content of the concentrate, total concentrate weight, concentrate grade, percent recovery and loss. The analyses were done by stepwise iteration of all streams in the flowsheet from comminution to the final concentrate. The results of the analyses show that the concentrate that has the best value for the new iron ore plant options is that produced by the new plant design option C (which employs floatation as the only recovery process) which has a concentrate grade of 70% iron mineral content representing a recovery of 95% and a loss of 5% respectively. This gives the best overall performance.