Silica sand quarry

Silica sand processing is of varying degrees of complexity, and depends on the nature of the raw material and the end use of the sand. It typically requires a high capital investment in plant. Processing is aimed at improving both the physical and chemical properties of the sand to meet user specifications. Typically several grades of sand are produced from one site either by selective extraction and/or processing. At most operations processing involves washing, attrition scrubbing and size-classification to remove the coarse and very fine fractions and to obtain a clean sand with the desired particle size distribution. Blending of lower and higher quality material is undertaken to optimise the use of the reserves. For the production of colourless glass sand, more sophisticated processing is required to remove contaminating impurities, either from the sand and/or from the surfaces of the individual sand grains. Gravity separation using spiral classifiers are used to remove heavy iron-bearing minerals and chromite. In