Phosphate Process Flowsheets & Simulations
Explore 2 validated, solved Phosphate simulation flowsheets in MaximaLabs — real components: fluorapatite, silica, dolomite, kaolinite, water. Open any one directly in your browser.
Solved via: NRTL.
Phosphate ore to marketable rock: attrition scrubbing, desliming, flotation
The front of the phosphate chain, ahead of the acid plant: 100 kg/s (360 t/h) of a sedimentary phosphate ore at 21.9% P₂O₅ (47.9% BPL) is scrubbed, deslimed at 105 microns and floated to a concentrate. The ore is fluorapatite with quartz, dolomite and kaolinite clay; it declares its size distribution and its composition by size, with the clay concentrated in the fines and bound into agglomerates in the coarse classes. Mineral densities are the published ones (fluorapatite 3.15 within the 3.1-3.2 range, quartz 2.65, dolomite 2.84, kaolinite 2.6 g/cm3). The attrition scrubber releases 80% of the coarse-bound clay below the cut and deslimes at 105 microns (150 mesh, the size Florida plants deslime at, Zhang et al., OSTI 1439932). 17.3% of the solids go to the slimes at 11.2% P₂O₅, so 8.9% of the P₂O₅ is lost with them; the deslimed sand is 24.1% P₂O₅. How much P₂O₅ a plant loses here is set by how much apatite is in the fines: Florida's matrix loses about a third of its P₂O₅ to the clays (the same report), this ore much less. The rougher floats fluorapatite at a rate set by each particle's grade: with 1 mm grains, 46% of the apatite in the deslimed feed sits in liberated particles. It recovers 95.3% of the deslimed apatite into a concentrate of 30.5% P₂O₅ (66.7% BPL), inside the 28.7-31.3% P₂O₅ of marketable phosphate rock (Smol et al., Materials 2023), at an overall recovery of 86.9% of the ore's P₂O₅. Bounded, and stated. Every ore parameter is illustrative and fitted to no deposit: the size distribution, the grade by size, the clay disaggregation, the grain size and the flotation rate constants are measured per ore and reagent scheme, and 1 kWh/t of scrubbing energy is a placeholder for the power figure. One rate constant serves all gangue, so dolomite floats no better than quartz here, which is the opposite of the real difficulty with carbonate phosphates (a reverse carbonate flotation or a dense-medium step is the usual answer). No froth, no entrainment beyond water recovery, no reagent consumption.
7 unit ops • NRTL
1 0
View & openLong-distance phosphate concentrate slurry pipeline (gravity line)
A phosphate concentrate slurry carried 187 km downhill from a mine plateau to a coastal fertilizer complex, the shape of OCP's Khouribga to Jorf Lasfar line, rated segment by segment as a Bingham plastic. The publicly stated figures used are: the 187 km length (Rusconi, Lakhouaja & Kopuz, 'The Design and Engineering of the 187 km Khouribga to Jorf Lasfar Phosphate Slurry Pipeline', Procedia Engineering 138 (2016) 142-150), that the line is gravity powered (Wikipedia, 'OCP Group'), Khouribga at 786 m above sea level (Wikipedia, 'Khouribga'; the same article's text says 820 m) and Jorf Lasfar on the Atlantic coast, taken here at sea level. Everything else is REPRESENTATIVE, not OCP data: the 0.75 m bore, the 1.6 m/s velocity (about 2,580 t/h of solids), 60 wt% solids, the five-segment profile with a 30 m ridge, the 5 bar head station pressure, and the rheology. Solid density 3150 kg/m3 is fluorapatite's specific gravity of 3.1-3.2 (Wikipedia, 'Fluorapatite'); its molar mass 0.5043 kg/mol is Ca₅(PO₄)3F from IUPAC 2021 atomic weights. The Bingham yield stress (5 Pa) and plastic viscosity (15 mPa s) are illustrative values chosen by us: no published rheology for this concentrate was reachable, and a real design uses the measured flow curve of the slurry it will carry. What the line shows, solved: the slurry is 1,690 kg/m3 and 32 vol% solids; it runs turbulent (Bingham Reynolds 1.35e5 against Hanks' transition at 4.4e4, Hedstrom 2.1e7, Darby-Mun-Boger friction), 85% above its laminar-turbulent transition velocity of 0.86 m/s, which is the operating limit a non-settling slurry is held to. Friction costs 52 kPa per km, 9.8 MPa over the line, against 13.0 MPa of static head gained on the mixture density, so the line needs no pumps, consistent with the gravity-powered description; the 37.6 bar left at the terminal is the excess head a real gravity line throttles in choke stations. The pressure dips to 10 bar at the top of the ridge, the point that would fall first if the flow rose. Each segment's Hedstrom and Reynolds numbers, regime, friction factor, static head and margin are in the pipe's Results tab. Honest scope: steady state only (no slack flow in the descending legs, no startup or shutdown transient, no water-hammer); the rheology is a constant Bingham fit at one temperature; no heat transfer; the profile is five straight segments, not a survey; and this example is not validated against OCP operating data.
3 unit ops • NRTL
1 0
View & open