Removal of iron from sandstone by magnetic separation and leaching: case of El-Aouana deposit (Algeria)

A holistic approach towards characterizing the El-Oued siliceous sand (eastern Algeria) for potential industrial applications

“…Nowadays, high purity siliceous materials (SiO 2 > 99%) find their application in a wide range of fields such as semiconductors, high-temperature lamp tubing, telecommunications and optics, microelectronics, and especially in photovoltaic silicon applications. Nevertheless, natural silica sand may contain several impurities (e.g., Al, Mg, K, and Fe) that would impact its technical specifications (Bouabdallah et al 2015;Elghniji et al 2020). Thus, silica sands are usually treated to remove impurities before any further processing.…”

“…Thus, silica sands are usually treated to remove impurities before any further processing. In this context, various studies have been carried out to prepare pure silica from natural sands using different routes, such as magnetic separation (Bouabdallah et al 2015;Haghi et al 2016), acid leaching (Sun et al 2013;Kheloufi et al 2017), a green purification method (Li et al 2016), reverse flotation technique, and ultrasound processing (Haghi et al 2016). For instance, Khalifa et al (2019) successfully attempted novel thermal techniques to remove metallic impurities.…”