Iron (FE) is a metallic element which makes up roughly 5% of the earth’s crust. Iron is mined vastly throughout Australia in many different areas including Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria. Australia is one of the world’s major iron ore producers, producing 393.9 Mt in 2009 alone, valued at roughly $30 billion. Iron serves many different purposes but it main use is to produce steel, steel is known to be the most useful metal being used 20 times more than any other metals found in the earth’s crust, therefore making the demand for fine quality iron ore extremely high. Iron ore is any form of rock in which iron can be economically extracted from. The iron within the rock comes in two main forms of iron oxides: magnetite and hematite. The three primary sources iron ores found within the earth’s crust are banded iron formations, magmatic magnetite ore deposits and hematite ore. The hematite and magnetite is physically extracted from the iron ore by using a fairly straightforward process of coarse crushing, fine crushing, classification, dry magnetic separating, floatation, thickening then drying. This process is known as dry magnetic separation.
Dry magnetic separation takes place once the iron ore had been extracted from the mine and delivered to the processing plant. Firstly the raw iron ore is put through a vibrating feeder which will feed iron ores into a jaw crusher which crushes the coarse iron ore into a finer form of iron ore sand. The iron ore sand is then fed through a secondary crusher known as a ball mill, the ball mill grinds the iron ore sand into the finest powder sized iron ore particles. The next stage of the separation process is classification. The classification process takes place in a spiral classifier which acknowledges that solid particles of various sizes have different precipitation rates in liquid