Iron occurs mainly as oxide ores, though it is also found in smaller quantities as its sulfide and carbonate. These other ores are usually first roasted to convert them into the oxide. On a world scale the most important ore is haematite (Fe2O3), but in New Zealand the starting materials are magnetite (Fe3O4) and titanomagnetite (Fe2TiO4). The oxides are reduced with carbon from coal, through t...

Since the start-up of Sossego copper concentrator, located in Carajás Mineral Province southeast Para State, Brazil, low-grade ore (~0.34% Cu) has been stockpiled, as defined long-term mine plan, to be reclaimed at end life. Given this imminent need process around 40 Mt ore, questions have raised related extent oxidation that might occurred stockpiled ore. In context, a study was designed chara...

This paper describes a neural ore grade estimation system developed at the AIMS Research Unit of the University of Nottingham. GEMNET II is a modular neural network system designed to receive drillhole information from an orebody and perform ore grade estimation on a block model basis. The aims of the system are to provide a valid alternative to conventional grade estimation techniques while re...

in this study, the isothermal reduction of iron oxide pellets, made of iranian chadormalo, gole-gohar, and sangan iron ores, was investigated in the temperature range of 900-1100°c. tabas, pabdana, babnizoo, karmozd, and shahrood domestic coals were used as reductants. parametric studies were performed and the effects of such factors as temperature, average particle size of iron ore and coal fi...

Barnett and Morse’ examined the economics of natural resource availability using data on capital, labour and output for the USA between 1870 and 1957. They tested the hypothesis that the scarcity of natural resources was increasing by examining the trend of unit cost of extractive products in the agricultural, mineral, forestry and fishing industries. Working in terms of index numbers they defi...

Current blast furnace technology is a two-stage ironmaking process that requires that iron ore concentrate first be formed into pellets, fired at 1260°C, cooled, transported to the blast furnace, and then re-heated to approximately 1500°C to produce pig iron. This heating, cooling, and then reheating wastes a great deal of energy, which would be saved if the ironmaking process had only a single...

Abstract: The huge consumption of iron ores in China has attracted much attention to utilizing low grade complex iron resources, such as high-aluminum hematite-limonite ore, which is a refractory resource and difficult to upgrade by traditional physical concentration processes due to the superfine size and close dissemination of iron minerals with gangue minerals. An innovative technology for a...

This paper introduces a neural network approach to the problem of ore grade estimation. The system under consideration consists of three neural network modules each responsible for a different area of the deposit, depending on the sampling density. Octant and quadrant search is used as a way of presenting input patterns to the modules. Both radial basis function networks and multi-layered perce...

The drum agglomeration of nickel laterite and gold ores has been optimized through the design of experiments (DOE) using a Taguchi L16 (45) orthogonal array to determine the optimum conditions for maximizing average agglomerate size and minimizing the amount of fines. The effects of controllable operating factors including moisture content (nickel laterite ore: 34-37%; gold ore: 7-10%), retenti...