Transportation of iron ore (mixture of both fines & lumps) from its mine to sea port using rail wagons which results in moisture content formation in the iron ore and leads to following problems:
- Subsequent iron ore processing takes time and consumes money.
- Iron ore fines gets glued to wagon surfaces and travels back to the mine.
- Moisture means water content which represents additional weight on the wagons.
What is the best way to de-moisturize (dry out) the iron ore before unloading it from the wagons at the port?
Inert adsorbents like silica gel or alumina gel (packets) will do well.
This is a little bit out of my area, but I see a very interesting problem. The "optimal" location for processing ore. You seem to accept that the ore arrives with moisture and would like to dry it at the port (in the car??) before returning the empty car. This solves only part of the problems you mention -- it returns clean cars. But it also means we have transported excess weight .... so how about process at the mine? Vale in Brazil performs a pelletization step to combine fine materials into pellets. They also have very nice car dumper mechanism (at the port) which completely empties the material.
As a location theory question, I see that any weight reduction and refinement at the mine (before transport) can save costly transport of waste material (possibly including moisture). What is the trade off in processing the material close to the source to reduce its moisture (and other impure) content?
Check this out -- these web pages are excellent!
http://www.vale.com/EN/business/mining/iron-ore-pellets/Pages/default.aspx
I think you can reduce the problem with a good system of drains in the wagons (in this case you minimizes the free water). We use 4 drains in the floor and 4 drains in the head of the wagon (polyurethane drains).
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