Application and Maintenance of Thickener in Concentration Plant

As one of dehydrating machines, thickenercommonly used for concentrating or dehydrating before filtering. It also could be used as machines to concentrate and purify coal, chemical, building material and source of water and sewage treatment which contain solid slurry in industry.

In order to use the recycling water and save tailing in tailing dam safely, thickeners are used in tailing dehydrating. In addition, thickeners are used to improve the technical process operation, such as increase the concentration of the slurry which are needed in processing ore material. So,  thickener is an essential dehydrating equipment in mineral processing technology.

Currently, mechanical unloading thickener are most commonly used which can operate continuously, also named as rake thickener. This kind of thickener can be divided into three types: central transmission thickener, traction thickener and multitray thickener. Traction thickener could be also divided into two types: peripheral rack transmission and peripheral roller transmission.

Though thickener is easy-managing in common operation, thickener is crucial to mineral processing plant. Thickener is one of the most important equipments in processing plant whose breakdown will lead to the whole plant shutdown. Then let us talk about some tips relating to maintaining thickener which are concluded by Xinhai drytailing technicians in yearly experience.

1.Tips of turning on and turning off

Operator should turn on the motor before feeding ore.When turning off thickener, operator should turn down the motor after stopping feeding. Encountering some special circumstance when thickener must be stopped, operator should stop feeding immediately and raise the rake or increase the amount of the discharge in order to prevent scraper from burying in the thickened slurry, guaranteeing the continuity and uniformity of feeding and discharge (discharge thickened ore material).

 2.Tips on common usage of thickener

During the common usage of thickener, in order to reach the standard of production, we should often check the concentration of both feeding ore and thickened ore,together with the quality of the overflowing. In practice, we can control the speed of discharging to control the concentration of the thickened ore. But while doing that, we should pay attention to prevent the solid material from increasing in overflow to assure the quality of overflow.

Thickener is crucial to plant, we should have a thorough understanding of factors which influence thickener’s production capacity. Thickener’s unit production capacity means the tons of material thickened by thickener in per thickened area in per day. The factors which influence it’s capacity including as following:

Firstly, Concentration of feeding and discharge

Secondly,Particle size of feeding

Thirdly,Viscosity of foam in slurry

Fourthly,Existence of reagent and electrolyte

Fifthly,Temperature of the slurry

Sixthly,Value of the thickened ore material

Apart from these factors, another important factor is the mud which is difficult to settle.Mud come from two way: first, the primary slime which formed in mining stage; second, secondary slime in crushing stage.Because the slime particle is very small, the surface area of particle is big. So the slime could save much water,and the content of the water depend on the wettability and capillary phenomenon. Because of the electrostatic repulsion of the molecular force and charged ion resulting balance of itself settlement tendency, colloidal particles between 0.1 micron to 0.001 micron do not have precipitation actually. So the slime is the most difficult material to settle in the process of settlement happened in thickener. During the mining processing, we commonly put electrolyte and colloidal surfactant (water glass or soda) to adjustment the ratio of the liquid material and solid material in slurry, or heating the slurry to help dispersive slime to flocculation and settle.

Currently, thanks for the national policy, drytailing project will be adopted by more plant. The demand of thickener will increase.So what we talked about thickener above is necessary .