Browsing by Author "Ayingayure, Amikiya Charles"

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    Characterisation of Iron Ore ā€” a case study of Mount Tokadeh, Western Nimba area, Liberia
    (2014-07-29) Ayingayure, Amikiya Charles
    ArcelorMittal Liberia is currently evaluating opportunities to develop the Mount Tokadeh iron ore deposit in Liberia. This deposit is defined in three zones: the top layer that is largely soft and limonitic (weathered oxide ore), the middle layer that consists of transitional oxidised ore including magnetite and hematite and the bottom layer that is magnetite in a hard rock matrix similar to taconite. The main objective of this research was to explore the feasibility of recovering the iron oxides and iron oxyhydroxides/hydroxides using physical separation techniques such as magnetic separation proposed by ArcelorMittal Liberia. Composite samples were prepared from each ore zone for ten different drill holes for Davis tube, SATMAGAN and chemical analysis. Due to weathering, the magnetite content is much lower in the oxidised ore than in the transitional and bottom primary layer. Iron recovery for both the oxide and transition material is only 34-35% and 71-74% for the primary ore, indicating that magnetic separation technique can be used to recover valuable iron bearing minerals in the primary ore zone. The quality of concentrate produced from the magnetic separation in the Davis tube is observed to be 66-68% Fe for all ore zones. Results from the Davis tube analysis indicated that a maximum of 42-44% of valuable iron would be lost to tailings in the oxide zone and a minimum 16-17% in the primary zone. There is strong positive correlation between the Davis tube and SATMAGAN results with an average correlation coefficient of 0.94 for all particle size groups studied. ā€ƒ