Diamond, this precious gemstone, not only attracts the world’s attention with its dazzling appearance, but also brings huge challenges to mineral processing engineers with its unique physical properties. Unlike other minerals, the value per carat of diamonds increases significantly as the particle size increases, which requires us to be extra cautious during the mineral processing process. When screening diamonds, we cannot use conventional methods of crushing and grinding into small particles. Sometimes It also requires manual screening.
The diamond beneficiation process includes three stages: washing, screening, rough selection, and selection. For rock diamond mines, sometimes the ore needs to be crushed first to dissociate the diamonds.
Diamond beneficiation process
1. Crushing (applicable to rock diamond mines)
Crushing is the first step in rock diamond beneficiation. Our goal is to fully dissociate the ore while maximizing the protection of the diamond crystals. The jaw crusher is mainly used at this stage because it can provide controllable crushing force and reduce damage to diamonds.
2 Screening and washing
The first step for placer diamonds is screening and washing. Screening can timely separate ores of suitable particle size during the crushing stage to avoid over-crushing the ore, and it can also prepare for the next step of mineral processing.
For diamond placers and some primary ores containing a large amount of clay, trommel scrubber is usually used for washing. This kind of equipment can not only wash the ore, but also perform preliminary classification at the same time, realizing the integration of washing and screening.
For diamond placers without clay, trommel screen and vibrating screen are used for particle size screening.
3. Rough selection stage
Jig separators are mainly used in the rough selection stage. The jig beneficiation method utilizes the differences in density, shape, and surface properties between diamonds and gangue to achieve preliminary separation through hydraulic action. Under the action of hydraulic force, the upper light minerals are discharged through the overflow with horizontal water, and the lower heavy minerals are discharged under the screen. The advantages of the jig beneficiation method are that the separation effect is better, the process is simple, and the water can be recycled.
4. Selection stage
What is obtained after rough selection of diamond ore is a mixture of diamonds and heavy minerals, in which the content of diamonds is still very low. In order to obtain diamonds, the rough concentrate must be further refined. Commonly used diamond beneficiation methods include: manual hand selection, X-ray beneficiation, ointment beneficiation, magnetic beneficiation, surface flotation, heavy liquid beneficiation, etc.
With years of intensive work in the field of ore beneficiation, our company has successfully provided advanced and efficient diamond beneficiation production lines to many customers at home and abroad. Our technical team is not only proficient in various mineral processing processes, but also good at customizing optimized treatment plans based on different ore characteristics.
If you are looking for reliable diamond beneficiation solutions, please feel free to contact us. Just send your mineral information and our team of experts will provide you with professional consultation and customized technical solutions to help you succeed in the field of diamond mining and processing.
