Utilization Status Of Bauxite in Brown Corundum Industry in China

Brown corundum is a kind of artificial industrial raw material, because of its high hardness, high temperature oxidation resistance, good chemical stability, excellent grinding performance, as a refractory raw material and abrasive is widely used in ceramics, metallurgy, building materials and mechanical processing and other fields.
Bauxite is the main raw material for smelting brown corundum, and is also the prerequisite for the survival of brown corundum industry. Most of China's bauxite resources are used to smelt metal aluminum, and only a small part is used as raw materials for refractory materials, corundum grinding materials, ceramics and other chemical products industry. At present, China's annual average consumption of bauxite resources about 14 million tons (including imported ore), of which aluminum industry 12 500 to 13 million tons, refractory materials and abrasives 11 to 12 million tons (including electric melt, high bauxite clinker and high aluminum cement, etc.), ceramics and other industries 4 to 5 million t. With the rapid expansion of alumina production capacity in China, the high quality bauxite resources for brown corundum smelting will be increasingly tight.
The lack of high-quality bauxite resources, resulting in the price of bauxite rising, the price of light burnt bauxite after dehydration has broken through the thousand yuan mark, the price of bauxite spent in the production cost of brown corundum smelting accounted for about 1/3 to 1/2 between, while smelting brown corundum bauxite grade is also declining, The decrease of grade means that the content of mineral impurities in the raw materials of smelting brown corundum will increase, which will not only affect the smelting process and product quality, but also greatly increase the energy consumption of smelting. Now the price of electricity and graphite electrodes is also rising, and the smelting of brown corundum mainly relies on the conversion of electric energy into heat energy to melt and reduce the material, and the energy consumption accounts for 2/5 to 1/2 of the smelting production cost. In summary, these circumstances have led to high production costs of brown corundum, and the production cost per ton of brown corundum block smelting has reached more than 3,000 yuan. The increase of energy consumption and production cost of smelting brown corundum leads to the survival pressure of brown corundum production enterprises, and the profit is very thin or even loss. Brown corundum as a relatively low price of products has been more difficult to bear the high cost, and now some small and medium-sized brown corundum production enterprises in China have stopped production because of smelting costs cannot be maintained.