Extracting minerals -Mining

Mining

The mining process I have chosen is the extraction of metal minerals from the earths crust. This process extracts metal from the extracted minerals to ethier sell or make product with.

The beginning of the process is the rock material being crushed into small grains by a crusher,explosives and quarrying.after being crushed the small grain like pieces of a rock are ground in grinding wheels, followed by a vibrating screen that puts the crushed pieces in grain sizes.

The next process is the mineral process where the valuable pieces are removed from the heap of crushed rock and are put through crushers and grinding wheels once more, making them smaller.Next the mineral separation process begins and using lots of methods leaching, emission, gravity methods and magnetic separation and the equipment emission chambers and pipes, coils and magnetic separation are used to separate the most valuable minerals to the least valuable.

In the next phase metal is extracted from the mineral. Extracting method depending on the mineral, the most common methods are pyrometallurgy (a metal production method employing high temperatures), hydrometallurgy (producing metal by leaching the raw material and flocculating the pure metal from the solution) and electrometallurgy (a metal production method applying electricity).

The very last stage which is called metal refining involves the metal that was just extracted going through a purifying process which uses heat, chemicals and electricity.