Any mining or mineral processing plant has three basic stages of preparation before the material is sized and sent for further process as final product or raw material for some other process. Let's take the case of the processing of Iron ore up until it reaches blast furnace where it is further processed to form pig iron and finally processed to steel.
The iron ore is first extracted from iron ore mines, through surface mining or underground mining processes and then stacked onto haul trucks. These haul trucks feed the material(with a non-uniform size range anywhere from fines to 800 mm lumps) into the primary crusher. This material is then moved along over to scalping screens using feeders. The screened material is then moved further to either a secondary crusher or a mill scrubber depending upon its size.
Once the material size reaches a desirable range, the material is carried off to steel processing plants, where along with other raw materials, the material is finally fed to the blast furnace. The fines are sent back to pelletization plant or sintering plant to make pellets or sinter lumps respectively. The process of screening is further carried out at certain steps until the feed to the blast furnace isn't exactly (-)80 mm size with less than 5% fines. The material that is rejected is sent back to the sintering plant and is worked on all over again.
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