Enrichment of wollastonite with high calcite content

Wollastonite plays a significant role as an industrial raw material in many fields; its exclusive properties mean that it is used in ceramics, paint, metallurgy and coatings. In nature, wollastonite mostly occurs with calcite. While the most common method for separating wollastonite from calcite is calcination, flotation is one of the methods for separating two minerals in a more economic, environmentally friendly way. In this study, the ore contains a large amount of calcite and augite, which is an iron bearing mineral that is subjected to magnetic separation, followed by flotation in order to obtain wollastonite and calcite concentrations individually. The SiO2, CaO and Fe2O3 contents in the ore are 28.00%, 48.20% and 0.45%, respectively. After magnetic separation has reduced the iron content, flotation experiments are carried out to find the optimum conditions. For the flotation process, the effect of particle size, pH and collector dosage are investigated. A wollastonite concentration of 84% purity is successfully achieved, with a 0.17% iron concentration under the optimal conditions of 100 micron particle size, pH 8 and 500 g/t collector dosage. The purity of the calcite is raised to 95% with the application of a cleaning stage.