21 August 2021

CDE Asia recently installed and commissioned a project in India to recover china clay which was bound around silica sand rock.
The Problem
The customer was manually washing the material for clay recovery. The product thus obtained was not meeting the market demand as the grains were quite large and the recovered clay had a significant presence of mica.
The Solution
MicroGrader® - CDE’s patented wet processing system subjected the clay bound silica rocks to intensive scrubbing using ShearClean Attrition Cell technology and washed them over a series of fine classification systems to screen at extremely fine apertures. The combination of attrition and screening process separated the clay and mica from the silica rock granules. The combined clay slurry then passed through CDE Nanowash hydrocyclone classification system, accurately set for fine separation, to recover the product in a fine-grained form. The fully automatic IoT enabled processing system included subjecting the recovered clay to the hydrocyclone’s overflow, thickening it for water recovery, and further dewatering it to arrive at the finished form ready for market. The clay now met the customer’s requirement of particle size, fineness and is devoid of mica.
Paper-coating grade of clay
Enthused with the significant improvement in product quality using the CDE plant, the customer sought further value addition in generating different grades of china clay suitable for high-end paper coating. High-quality clay products are evaluated based on their particle size range and brightness as measured by the L value. Brightness can improve by reducing the Iron(Fe) and Titanium Dioxide (Ti02) levels. CDE has undertaken test work through various processes and is confident of bringing down the Fe level in the recovered clay from around 1.5% to the desired level of