WET GRAVITY CIRCUIT SERIES

Ilmenite is upgraded at Chandala to SR, a high-TiO2 feedstock for our Kwinana and other TiO2 pigment plants. Two dredges in a single pond feed an ore slurry to a floating concentrator to produce HMC, which is hauled by trucks 110 km south to our Chandala metallurgical complex near Muchea, 60 km north of Perth, for the recovery of ilmenite, rutile, leucoxene and zircon. Northern Operations complex in Western Australia is consisted of the Cooljarloo dredge mine and floating heavy mineral concentration plant and the Chandala metallurgical site which includes a mineral separation plant and a synthetic rutile plant that produces synthetic rutile. The tails are directed either via a float line and floating tails stacker back to the dredge pond to form stable beaches and return stripped overburden or sent via external tails pipelines up to six kilometres in length to backfill previously mined out pits.Ĭlay from the ore is dried in purpose-built cells on the mined pits and on future mine path. Tailings from the plant comprise washed sand and clay at 2,950 tonnes per hour. HMC is pumped to a central stockpile where it is stacked, ready for rehandling into road trains for transport to our processing facility at Chandala. These facilities are controlled by operators via computers and GPS satellite navigation. The pond is up to one k long and 400 m wide. The pond water is natural groundwater and is fresh. Together they mine 24 million tonnes of ore per year, which is delivered to the shared Wet Processing Plant. Two dredges operate in a pond up to 25 m deep and mine ore between 22 and 30 m thick. Pit wall slopes are typically 30 degrees but can be up to 45 degrees in areas of higher clay content. Any high overburden faces are extracted in 4 metre benches. Over the life of mine, overburden quantity averages 5Mbcm/a. Excavator used is typically a Komatsu PC2000. Truck types commonly used are Cat 785B and 777's as well as articulated D400E. Overburden is usually dumped directly onto the sand tailings beach at the back of the pond, or onto dried out clay-fines cells, to create final landform. Overburden is generally removed 3 months ahead, exposing enough ore to keep apart the dredges and mining face so as not to compromise safety and production risks. Because less than 5% of the total sands mined are removed during mining, the rehabilitation program can establish similar landforms and ecosystems to the original countryside. The heavy mineral concentrate produced at Cooljarloo is transported south in specially designed road trains to Tronox’s Chandala Processing Plant for separation and processing.Īs mining operations move through the orebody, sand and clay are returned to fill the void and the surface is contoured to landforms similar to those that existed prior to mining.

WET GRAVITY CIRCUIT SERIES

The dredging operation uses one of the world’s largest floating dredges in a purpose-built pond to pump slurried ore at a rate of 3,000 tonnes per hour to a floating concentrator which recovers heavy minerals from the sand and clay using a series of gravity spirals. Cooljarloo is 170 kilometres north of Perth, where the company produces heavy mineral concentrates from dredging and dry mining operations.

Wet gravity circuit