Flowsheet Design and Layout Preparation of Coal Processing Plants

Layout of a Coal Preparation plant involves several equipments housed sequentially with the sole objective of producing a coal of certain desired quality. Design of such plant consists of three basic steps viz., development of a flowsheet, equipment selection and layout prepartion. This task is done very judiciously by a team of engineers after several permutations and combinations. For a coal of known washability characteristics, one can design several flowsheets but ultimately the type of flowsheet to be adopted is decided by capital cost and life of the plant operation. The present lecture material has been prepared purely from the academic point of view to bring awareness about the basic information(s) that one need to collect for the design of flowsheet and preparation of a layout. The steps that are to be adopted in designing of such plants, selection of equipments and its layout preparation are described in this lecture in detail. Hence the facts that are narrated in this topic are the information(s) collected from the literature to which the experiences of the author gained over the years in this field has been added

Recovery of Hematite from Banded Hematite Quartzite of Southern India by Magnetic Separation and Reverse Flotation

Recovery and grade are the two crucial performance parameters commonly used in mineral processing plant operations. These two parameters are interdependent. An increase in recovery would result in a decreased product grade and vice versa. The present study enumerates concentration efficiency (CE),which can be adopted exclusively for processing low-grade hematite ore by WHIMS—the reverse flotation route to produce a pellet grade concentrate. In this study, the ore’s amenability by wet high-intensity magnetic separation followed by the reverse flotation of a magnetic concentrate route is investigated on BHQ samples of the Sandur schist belt (Kumaraswamy hills), India, after its characterization by microscopic and XRD studies. Dodecyl amine acetate was used as a collector to float siliceous gangue while depressing hematite using the freshly synthesized caustic starch as a depressant. The separation efficiency of the flotation was evaluated by estimating the grade, recovery, and concentration efficiency. The WHIMS conducted using the feed with the particle size minus 106 µm (d80 = 82 µm) followed by reverse flotation produced a pellet grade concentrate assaying 64.60% Fe, a 0.32 alumina-to-silica ratio with 60.4% Fe recovery, and a yield of 37.4% with 79.0% concentration separation efficiency