Recovery of Heavy Minerals from Korean Beach Sand

In order to establish the optimized recovery process for heavy minerals from beach sand, we investigated the physical separation methods such as gravity and magnetic separation followed by mineralogical characterization. There was clear relationship between the particle size and the heavy mineral content that the heavy minerals were mostly concentrated in the particles below 100mesh. Grav-ity separation using the spiral and shaking table sepa-rators made it possible to concentrate heavy minerals by rejecting the light and coarse particles consist mainly of quartz. The high-intensity magnetic separator and subsequent induced magnetic separator were applied to fractionate magnetic particles into three fractions accor-ding to their magnetic susceptibility. The content of TiO, of high magnetic susceptible ilmenite-rich fraction was 43.98wt.% while those of ZrO2 of non-magnetic and magnetic residue were 6.78wt.% and 3.11 wt. %. respectively.