Research Status of Spodumene Flotation: A Review

With the fast development and popularization of electronic equipment and new energy industry, the consumption and demands for lithium are on a rapid rise. Spodumene is one of the important lithium resources, so it is of great significance to concentrate it. Beneficiation methods of spodumene include magnetic separation, gravity separation, and flotation. Since the major gangue minerals of spodumene are quartz and feldspar, flotation becomes the most important way to concentrate spodumene. In this paper, various researches related to spodumene flotation were reviewed. It can be seen that the surface properties of spodumene changed with the variation of size fraction, surface dissolution, isomorphous substitution, and grinding method, which means that different spodumene surfaces showed diverse properties. Metal ions such as Fe3+, Ca2+, and Mg2+ can improve and strengthen the flotation behavior of spodumene effectively, when NaOL or NaOL/DDA is used as a collector. The hydroxy complexes of these ions played an important role in the collector adsorption. In the aspect of spodumene collectors, most of the new spodumene collectors reported were mixed collectors; nevertheless, the number of the researches on spodumene collectors was still limited. This review provided a detailed, comprehensive, and valuable reference source for the current research status of spodumene flotation, and provided references for the future researches to improve and strengthen the flotation behavior of spodumene.