High-Purity Silica Sand: Beneficiation and Chemical Purification — An Engineering Study (El Ma Labiod / Tenoukla Deposit, Tébessa, Algeria)

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Silica sand is among the highest-tonnage industrial minerals and one of the most poorly differentiated: the same compound is traded across four orders of magnitude of unit value, separated entirely by purity, size control and consistency. This study sets out the engineering by which that separation is achieved, developed from first principles and demonstrated throughout on a documented deposit — the Tenoukla silica sand at El Ma Labiod, Wilaya of Tébessa, north-eastern Algeria.

The treatment is organised so that the engineering stands independently of the case. It covers deposit genesis and type, exploration and evaluation methodology, and the full physical beneficiation circuit — screening, hydrocyclone classification, attrition scrubbing, gravity concentration, low- and high-intensity magnetic separation, flotation, dewatering and closed-circuit water management — followed by chemical purification: leaching thermodynamics and kinetics, the mineral, organic and hydrofluoric acid systems, alkaline dissolution and controlled re-precipitation, corrosion engineering and materials selection, and reagent balances. Each unit operation is developed through its engineering objective, governing mechanism, design and operating parameters, process variables, optimisation and control philosophy, and is supported by its own schematic. Laboratory characterisation, testwork programme design and mass-balance closure are treated as a discipline in their own right.

The case study contributes an original characterisation from a 53-sample channel dataset. A near-perfect inverse correlation between silica and alumina (r = −0.991) establishes that grade is governed almost entirely by aluminosilicate dilution, with the practical consequence that grade control may be exercised through an alumina proxy rather than full silica assay. Granulometric analysis places approximately 32.5 per cent of run-of-mine mass outside the flat-glass specification envelope, identifying size distribution rather than chemistry as the dominant control on plant yield — a distinction with direct consequences for reserve conversion and plant sizing. Documented washing and plant-scale beneficiation results are reassessed, including a recomputation of the reported iron-reduction figure, and the residual feldspar-hosted alumina surviving physical processing is identified as the constraint that determines the chemical route and its cost structure.

Throughout, a strict separation is maintained between general engineering, referenced to international literature, and deposit-specific data, which is identified as such wherever it appears; gaps in the experimental record are stated explicitly rather than estimated. 109 pages, 65 figures, 20 tables.