PROCESSING OF IRON ORE FINES FROM ALSWAWEEN KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA

Iron ores located in the Alswaween area (Saudi Arabia) are of finely disseminated nature. They require ultrafine grinding for considerable degree of liberation. In this paper, different upgrading tech- niques were tried for their processing. The applied upgrading techniques included selective flocculation and column flotation as recent efficient technologies in fines upgrading. Each technique was investigated and optimized separately. Results showed that neither selective flocculation nor column flotation can be successfully used alone to produce high quality iron concentrate especially when using iron ore of size fraction 100% -0.075 mm. The best quality concentrate was found to have 55% Fe and 57% Fe when applying selective flocculation and column flotation, respectively at their optimum operating conditions. Meanwhile, the previously obtained results can be significantly improved when grinding the ore below 45 µm and applying selective flocculation as cleaning step for the concentrate obtained from the column flotation. Thus, it is possible to obtain concentrate having iron content of 63.55% Fe with 52.3% yield, which means an iron recovery in concentrate of ~80%.