Study on the Preparation of High-Quality Quartz and Its Mechanism by Combining Pretreatment with Metallurgy

As a strategically important resource with stable properties, high-purity quartz plays a crucial role in various fields such as high-purity quartz crucibles, semiconductors, and electronics. Currently, the availability of high-quality quartz resources is gradually diminishing, and there are no high-quality quartz deposits in some areas, making the improvement of low-quality quartz essential. This study focuses on the quartz sand produced through river dredging in Yueyang. The detected SiO2 content is 92.31%, which enables the secondary utilization of waste resources and provides significant environmental benefits. In this study, the iron oxide removal efficiency achieved through magnetic separation pretreatment can reach 87.24%. Following flotation, calcination, and leaching processes, high-purity quartz products with a total impurity content of less than 100 ppm were successfully obtained. In addition, the factors affecting magnetic separation and calcination effect were studied, and the process parameters for reference were obtained. The mechanism of microwave impurity removal was investigated using SEM, TG-MS, and in-situ XRD, demonstrating the feasibility of producing high-purity quartz from low-quality quartz.