Development course of mineral processing

Early mineral processing is a physical separation process that uses the differences of physical properties or surface physical and chemical properties between minerals without changing the chemical composition of minerals. It is mainly used to treat metal ores, which is called "ore separation". Later, it was extended to the separation of nonmetallic mineral raw materials, which was called "mineral processing". Later, the process of recovering useful components from mineral raw materials by chemical methods was also included in mineral processing, which was called chemical mineral processing.

Mineral processing has gone through the development process from processing coarse-grained materials to fine-grained materials, from processing simple ores to complex ores, and from simply using physical methods to using physical and chemical methods. In the early days, people chose by hand; Later, metal minerals were collected from river sand with simple elutriation tools. The "boat-shaped barrel" of Tonglushan mining and metallurgy site in Hubei, China is a tool for elutriating copper ore more than 2000 years ago. In "Schumann" written by Tang Fanzhuo, there is a record that "bran gold comes out of Lishui and is eliminated by sand", which describes the situation of gold mining and mineral processing at that time. "Tiangong Record" records the "cleaning and elutriation" and "smelting in the furnace" after ore mining, as well as the beneficiation process of tin and other ores. In Europe and America, the mechanical gravity separation equipment-piston jig appeared in 1848, the electrostatic separator was invented in 1880, and the magnetic separator was invented in 1890, which promoted the development of iron and steel industry. The shaker was invented by 1893. Before flotation was widely used,