Investigation on Beneficiation Strategy for Collophane

Phosphate being one of the three major nutrients required for agricultural plant growth usually presents as collophane in China. Since fine phosphate and other gauge minerals associate with each other and form intergrowth, the beneficiation of collophane is extremely difficult. In this paper, the flotation strategy for a low grade collophane ore from Guizhou province in China was studied in detail. Direct, reverse and direct-reverse combined flotation sheets were employed to collophane flotation. The results reveal that direct-reverse flotation is a suitable flotation flow sheet for this collophane ore. With direct-reverse flotation sheet, the grade of P2O5 in concentrate is 33%, which is improved by 3% comparing direct flotation and P2O5 recovery could achieve 80%. In addition, content of MgO decreased to 0.9%, which satisfied the requirement of wet-process phosphoric acid.