Abstract

The current work provides an easy fast route to extract iron oxide from low-grade iron ore. The method deals with one simple method to get rid of three compounds silica, alumina and manganese present with iron oxide in the ore. It depends on mixing the ore with sodium hydroxide, and heating it to interact with the existing elements and not with iron. The treatment is repeated twice to improve the results. XRF, SEM, and EDAX were employed to characterize untreated and treated ore. The current method succeed to get rid of 86.4% of silica, 87.4% of Al2O3, and 74.6 % of MnO. 75.8 % increasing in Fe2O3 concentration was recorded. The ore second treatment with 1 M of sodium hydroxide at 550 oC for one hour was considered optimal condition for this study. EDAX results show an observable increase in the iron percentage after treatment (36%). These results are in a good agreement with results obtained by XRF and SEM. SEM images, before and after the treatment, show a significant difference. An increase in the concentration of spherical particulate aggregates of Fe2O3 was found, which represent the majority of the sample.