Production of a Phosphate Concentrate from the Tailings of a Niobium Ore Concentrator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Apatite is the main source of phosphorous for the making of chemical fertilizers. While apatite is usually recovered from phosphate orebodies as the primary product of a mining exploitation, this paper documents the approach taken to produce a phosphate concentrate as a secondary product from the tailings of a niobium ore concentrator. The conventional desliming/flotation scheme used to process phosphate ores was tested and adapted to process one of the reject streams of a niobium concentrator in order to produce a salable phosphate concentrate. For that particular material, it was found that the reverse flotation of apatite yielded better results than the commonly used direct flotation of apatite. The recommended approach to produce the phosphate concentrate is desliming followed by reverse flotation of apatite and an acid leaching of the apatite concentrate to lower the MgO content below the specification for a phosphate concentrate. The obtained phosphate concentrate assays more than 32% P2O5 at a P2O5 recovery of 41%, which although low is found to be economic for the case of processing plant reject tailings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".