The Beneficiation of Iron Concentrate from the Mazreh Copper Mine Plant Tail by Wet Magnetic Separation and Analysis of the Results Using PLS Method

In this paper, the beneficiation treatment of iron concentrate from the Mazreh copper mine mineral processing plant tail has been studied by a wet magnetic separation method based on a full factorial experiment design and the process analysis has been made using Partial Least Square (PLS) modeling. The obtained results indicated that the production of iron concentrate with an appropriate recovery and assay would not be easily obtained using only one step wet magnetic separation, but sufficiently removing of the unwanted sulfur and silica elements is impossible and needs at least two steps magnetic separation practice and further grinding. A detailed investigation indicated that by employing the two magnetic separation, iron concentrates with 3.7-4.5 % SiO2 and 67.2-69.3 % Fe with recoveries of 78-92% are attainable depending on operating variables. The sulfur amount was negligible and was reported below detectable range (less than 0.001%). The use of partial least square modeling yielded a three component model explaining 92.11% and predicting 73% of the total variance of the responses simultaneously. The PLS modeling results indicated that the grinding and subsequently primary and the secondary magnetic intensities, in turn, are the most influential factors on iron concentrate processing. The Sweet spot plot as an overlay of response contour plots indicated that there is a wide optimum region within searched space wherein appropriate iron concentrates are easily obtainable, which was verified by the experiments.