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Mineralogical Characterization and Optimization of Fe and Mn Through Roast-Leaching of Ferromanganese Ore

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Abstract

Iron and manganese both are important ferrous metals, and they usually need to be extracted separately for better usage. Ferromanganese ore from the Yunnan Province of China was investigated by subjecting it to reduction roasting, leaching, magnetic separation, hydrometallurgical separation process, X-ray diffraction (XRD), electron probe micro-analysis (EPMA) and scanning electron microscopy/energy-dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS). It is noted that the ferromanganese ore contains valuable components or elements of 21.41 wt% Fe2O3 and 19.88 wt% MnO, which are 14.99% and 15.40% of the total of Fe and Mn, respectively, with a large amount of impurities comprising 33.00 wt% SiO2, 9.81%wt% Al2O3, etc. After roasting, microscopic examination showed the presence of haematite, magnetite, pyrolusite, psilomelane, hollandite, marcasite, pyrite, limonite, braunite and manganite, while XRD analysis showed that the magnetite content increases with the increase in roasting temperature, reflecting the increase in conversion of haematite to magnetite. Based on EPMA and SEM-EDS analysis, it was shown that the haematite and magnetite interface were the main Fe-bearing minerals; however, the dissemination of the two minerals, that is, haematite and magnetite with the coexistence of Fe- and Mn-bearing minerals, will result in difficulty in effective separation of Fe and Mn. The effective roasting temperature and roasting time were 800 °C and 60 min, respectively, to avoid the formation of a composite oxide of MnxFe3-xO4 beyond 800 °C. The Fe recovery via roasting and magnetic separation only was 66.56%, whereas a combination of magnetic separation which ensued after the leaching process showed a recovery of 80.08% and 59.95% of Fe and Mn, respectively.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support by the State Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 51874219). The authors would like to extend their sincere thanks to the China University of Geosciences, especially teacher Manrong Jiang for her support during microscopy analysis. Our feelings of gratitude are also addressed to teacher Jin Feng Chen of the School of Resources and Environmental Engineering at Wuhan University of Technology for her kindly support in chemical analyses of different samples.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Resources and Environmental Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China

    J. Christophe Niyonzima, Liqun Luo, Ekata Emmanuel Edo & Sayaf Mustafa

  2. Key Laboratory of Mineral Resources Processing and Environment of Hubei, Wuhan, 430070, Hubei, China

    J. Christophe Niyonzima, Liqun Luo, Ekata Emmanuel Edo & Sayaf Mustafa

  3. Department of Mineralogical and Geological Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, Burundi University, P.O. Box 2700, Bujumbura, Burundi

    J. Christophe Niyonzima

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  1. J. Christophe Niyonzima
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  2. Liqun Luo
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Correspondence to Liqun Luo.

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Niyonzima, J.C., Luo, L., Edo, E.E. et al. Mineralogical Characterization and Optimization of Fe and Mn Through Roast-Leaching of Ferromanganese Ore. Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration 38, 1509–1523 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42461-021-00390-2

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