Rare earths are a series of chemical elements found in the Earth’s crust that are vital to many modern technologies. Rare earth minerals include 17 elements that share similar chemical properties but unique properties that make them essential to new technologies.
Rare earths are difficult to exploit because they aren’t found in large quantities or veins like other minerals such as gold. They need to be separated from one another using a variety of mining and processing techniques. Most rare eather mines only produce these types of elements using large-scale techniques that involve drilling, blasting, and hauling. The elements are separated and purified and then refined to meet industry standards for the proper applications. The cost of putting together a rare earth mine can cost up to a half a billion dollars or more. Stone crusher, ball mill and other beneficiaton equipment are essential during rare earth mine process.
These 17 elements are important to the manufacture of many high tech products, including consumer electronics, computers and networks, communications, clean energy, advanced transportation, health care, environmental mitigation, national defense, and many others. These elements help make many technologies perform with reduced weight, reduced emissions, and energy consumption; or give them greater efficiency, performance, miniaturization, speed, durability, and thermal stability. Rare earth-enabled products and technologies help global economic growth, maintain high standards of living, and even save lives . In fact, many of the things you use everyday would not exist without rare earth elemenets.
Rare earth (RE) mineral deposits are typically processed using several different unit operations including flotation, gravity, magnetic and electrostatic separation techniques. Two of the most important beneficiation techniques for RE minerals are gravity and magnetic separation.
1. Flotation is one of the main process methods in rare earth ore concentrators, and it is almost inseparable from flotation. This method uses the difference in surface wettability of rare earths and associated minerals for selection. By adding flotation agents, with the help of the buoyancy of the air bubbles, the useful rare earth minerals are attached to the air bubbles and then floated up to complete the separation, and finally obtain qualified rare earth concentrates.
2. The separation of rare earth ores by gravity separation is mainly a process of separating minerals based on density differences in a certain fluid medium, and is generally used in small and medium-sized rare earth ores concentrators. The process is mainly to roughly select the qualified ore particles (-2mm range) obtained after grinding and classifying with a shaking table, and then sweep the obtained roughed tailings through a shaking table, and obtain the roughened concentrate. The concentrate can be used as the final rare earth concentrate.
3. Rare earth ore leaching processes can be divided into three types, namely barrel leaching, pool leaching and heap leaching. Among them, the bucket leaching method was applied earlier, because of its low efficiency, it has been replaced by pool leaching and heap leaching.
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