2092
Preliminary Results from a Start-Up Pilot Plant Processing
Heavy Minerals Using Bangladesh River Sands
M.I. Pownceby, W.J. Bruckard
CSIRO Mineral Resources, Cayton South, VIC, Australia
M.A. Rahman, P.K. Biswas, M.N. Zaman
Institute of Mining, Mineralogy and Metallurgy (IMMM), Bangladesh Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research (BCSIR), Science Laboratory Road, Khonjonpur, Joypurhat, Bangladesh
N. Haque
CSIRO Energy, Cayton South, VIC, Australia
ABSTRACT: The Bangladesh Government is examining the feasibility of mining river sands in Bangladesh as
potential sources of heavy minerals (HM) for export and/or domestic use. Since 2010 research at BCSIR and
CSIRO has focussed on the HM potential of the northern Brahmaputra River and in 2022 a pilot plant was
constructed at Joypurhat in Bangladesh to develop and test appropriate beneficiation flowsheets. This study
presents characterisation studies on selected product streams from the pilot plant. Emphasis is on the recovered
TiO2-rich and garnet components to assess the potential ilmenite processing options and product applications.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years the Bangladesh Government has started
to look closely at the feasibility of mining river sand sys-
tems as a potential source of heavy mineral (HM) sands.
Non-marine alluvial sand placer deposits are known to be
sources of heavy minerals e.g., Gbangbama deposit in Sierra
Leone (Force, 1991), and such deposits may be promi-
nent in Bangladesh as river and drainage systems within
Bangladesh are extensive, carrying large quantities of sandy
sediments downstream to the coastal regions. The alluvial
sediments contain both light and heavy minerals with the
heavy minerals generally deposited on the bed of the river
systems forming heavy mineral-rich sand bars.
Research by the Bangladesh Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research (BCSIR) since 2010 has focussed on
assessing the heavy mineral potential of the Brahmaputra
River which originates in Tibet, flows through the north-
eastern part of India, and enters Bangladesh in the
Kurigram District. The river system is a large-scale sand-
bed braided river of ~15 km width, with individual chan-
nels of 2–3 km wide (Rahman et al., 2012). Work by the
BCSIR in association with the Commonwealth Scientific
and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia
to study the mineralogy, morphology, magnetic properties,
and composition of the sand from the northern section of
the Brahmaputra River has identified that magnetic min-
erals present include ilmenite, magnetite, and garnet with
a grainsize of 125–250 µm (Rahman et al., 2014 2016).
Non-magnetic heavy minerals include zircon, rutile, xeno-
time, monazite, and sillimanite. Compared to HM sand
accumulations in beach sand deposits, the concentration
of these minerals in river sands is usually significantly
lower, as little as 5–10% c.f. 23% in beach sands (Force,