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Effect of Grinding Liberation on Recovery of Silicon from MG-Si Waste Slag by Flotation

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Abstract

Metallurgical-grade silicon-refined waste slag (MGSRS) was produced during the MG-Si refining production process, which occupies huge amounts of land resources, caused the loss of nearly 110,000 tons of MG-Si every year. Therefore, it is of great significance to recover the elemental silicon from MGSRS. However, because silicon is tightly wrapped by slag and difficult to separate, this resulting in the difficulty of silicon recovery. In this study, silicon recovery powders were obtained through the process of grinding liberation and flotation separation. The effect of grinding time on the liberation of MGSRS and the flotation recovery of silicon was studied. The liberation mechanism of MGSRS was further discussed. The results showed that the liberation degree of silicon particles was 79.45% (grinding for 15 min), which was 7.94% higher than that of silicon particles after 5 min grinding time, and 77.15% of the silicon particles were fully liberated. The flotation recovery of silicon can increase from 10.5 to 78.7% with the appropriate collector. Mechanism study showed that during the grinding process, silicon was separated along the (111) surface, and Ca2Al2SiO7 had the largest amount of liberation along the (211) plane. More unsaturated sites of aluminum and calcium ions were observed on the silicate surface, which were favorable for adsorption with the reagent and beneficial to the silicon recovery. These results indicated that the silicon and slag of MGSRS can be sufficiently separated through grinding and flotation, and the purity of recovered silicon was about 70%. The silicon resources in MGSRS were recovered economically and could be used as the raw materials for the preparation of silicon alloy and high purity silicon.

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No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Kunming University of Science and Technology for providing scientific research conditions.

Funding

This research was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Nos. 2018YFC1901805, 2018YFC1901801), the Yunnan Provincial Department of Education Science Research Foundation (No.2023J0128), the Yunnan Provincial Outstanding Youth Science Foundation (No. 202101AV070007), the Reserve Talents of Young and Middle-aged Academic and Technical Leaders in Yunnan Province(No. 2018HB009), the Key Science and Technology Specific Projects of Yunnan Province (No. 202202AG050012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Complex Nonferrous Metal Resources Clean Utilization, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, 650093, China

    Ning Tan, Shifeng Han, Kuixian Wei & Wenhui Ma

  2. Research Center for Analysis and Measurement, Kunming University of Science and Technology, and Analytic & Testing Research Center of Yunnan, Kunming, 650093, China

    Ning Tan

  3. Silicon Material Industry Research Institution (Innovation Center) of Yunnan Province, Kunming, 650093, China

    Kuixian Wei, Dandan Wu & Wenhui Ma

Authors
  1. Ning Tan
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  2. Shifeng Han
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  3. Kuixian Wei
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  4. Dandan Wu
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  5. Wenhui Ma
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Contributions

Ning Tan: Experimental, Data curation, Original draft preparation, Validation.Shifeng Han: Experimental auxiliaryKuixian Wei: Methodology, SupervisionDandan Wu: Methodology, GuidanceWenhui Ma: Conceptualization.

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Correspondence to Kuixian Wei.

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Tan, N., Han, S., Wei, K. et al. Effect of Grinding Liberation on Recovery of Silicon from MG-Si Waste Slag by Flotation. Silicon (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12633-024-02960-7

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