Manufacturers of building and sanitary ceramics are increasingly emphasizing the issue of iron removal, with many companies placing it on their agenda and having top-level leaders personally oversee or directly manage it. The applications of iron removal equipment are expanding, evolving from iron removal in glaze to also removing iron from greenware. The demand for iron removal is growing, with products requiring it including daily-use ceramics, sanitaryware, and various types of light-colored wall and floor tiles, polished tiles, etc. The standards for iron removal are also rising, with production lines transitioning from not using iron removal equipment to installing one, then to installing 3 to 4 multi-stage series iron removal units. The number of magnetic rods in a single iron removal tank has increased from a dozen to a couple of hundred, leading to higher investments.
Due to the rapid depletion of mining resources, many companies are unable to source nearby and are unable to afford low-iron standard raw materials. As a result, they have resorted to downstream processing, using a large number of iron separators. On some production lines, the iron removal process has increased to over a dozen workers, leading to ever-increasing costs for iron removal.
3. The cleaning process is entirely manual, making quality assurance challenging. Typically, a batch of 100 to 300 magnetic rods is cleaned by 1 to 3 workers per shift, with a continuous rotation of cleaning one rod after another. It takes approximately 1 to 2 hours to clean a batch. When the raw material has a high iron content, a thick layer of iron mud often accumulates around the magnetic rods, significantly reducing the iron removal effect. Additionally, with numerous factors influencing human emotions, quality management becomes difficult to control.
4. The magnetic rods available on the market have inconsistent quality due to an excessive number of manufacturers and a wide variety of brands. Many are poorly made using substandard materials, and the ends of the rods are not sealed properly. These products flooding the market have led to a continuous decline in the average lifespan of magnetic rods used by enterprises. Additionally, the "nominal" B-value of magnetic rods on the market is generally overestimated, often by 50% to 100% higher than the measured value.
5. Dry powder iron removal commonly employs drum vibration separators and belt conveyor iron separators, mainly used to remove iron oxide particles that infiltrate during long-distance conveyance of powdered materials. The results are satisfactory, and the number and scale of users are continually increasing.
6. The research and trial period for electromagnetic iron separators was early on, and the reactions have been generally positive, especially for the separation of weakly magnetic materials in the original ore with high-power strong magnetic fields. However, the investment is substantial, the power consumption is high, and the lifespan is not long, which has affected its widespread application.
7. The developed countries of the world process and produce ceramic raw materials in a centralized and standardized manner. Their iron-removing equipment is typically large-scale, high-flow, high-power, and fully automatic electromagnetic iron separators, which are massive in size and expensive, costing anywhere from hundreds of thousands to several million yuan.
