Rare earths, known as the "vitamins of industry," are indispensable in fields such as smartphones, electric vehicles, and national defense equipment. How are they extracted from ores? This starts with the rare earth beneficiation process.
The mined raw ore is a mixture of rare earths and gangue minerals. The first step is crushing. The coarse jaw crusher and fine jaw crusher act like "crushers," breaking large ore blocks into small particles to prepare for subsequent processing.
The crushed ore is evenly fed into the ball mill by a vibrating feeder. The steel balls inside the ball mill continuously impact and grind the ore, refining the ore particles and initially separating rare earth minerals from impurities.
The ground ore enters the classifier, where it is classified according to particle size and settling speed. Qualified fine-grained ore proceeds to the next process, while coarse particles are returned to the ball mill for re-grinding. After that, the vibrating screen further screens, and the ore that meets the particle size requirements enters the shaking table. The shaking table utilizes the differences in mineral density and particle size to achieve the initial enrichment of rare earth minerals.
The final step is the magnetic separation process. Since rare earth minerals are magnetic, the magnetic separator acts like a "magnetic separation master," separating the magnetic minerals containing rare earths to obtain rare earth concentrates.
These rare earth concentrates have a wide range of uses: in the new energy field, they are core materials for electric vehicles and wind turbines; in the electronic technology field, they can improve the performance of mobile phone and computer chips; in the national defense and military industry field, they ensure the precise operation of missiles and fighter jets.
However, rare earth beneficiation also faces challenges. Some ores have complex compositions, making it difficult to separate rare earths from gangue minerals, which can easily lead to resource waste. At the same time, the beneficiation process consumes a lot of energy and produces waste such as tailings, which can pollute the environment if not handled properly.
In the future, there are three major development trends in rare earth beneficiation technology. Firstly, intelligence. With the help of technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence, intelligent monitoring and automatic adjustment of beneficiation equipment will be realized, improving efficiency and quality while reducing maintenance costs. Secondly, green environmental protection. The development of green beneficiation reagents, improvement of comprehensive utilization of tailings, reduction of energy consumption, and minimization of environmental impact will be focused on. Thirdly, combined beneficiation. Combining multiple beneficiation methods to overcome the separation difficulties of complex ores and improve the recovery rate of rare earths.
With the development of these technologies, the rare earth beneficiation process will continue to progress, better meeting the demand for rare earth resources in various fields and providing strong support for scientific and technological progress and social development.
