Brazil is home to some of the world’s highest-quality quartz resources. Owing to its extreme hardness (Mohs hardness 7) and excellent chemical stability, quartz is widely used in high-end industrial fields such as engineered stone slabs, precision ceramics, electronic packaging materials, and paints and coatings. Recently, a well-known Brazilian mining company sought to increase the added value of its products by implementing an ultrafine grinding solution capable of processing high-purity quartz ore to D97: 10 μm.
Key Challenges
During the ultrafine grinding of quartz, the customer faced three major challenges:
- Extremely high abrasiveness: The high hardness of quartz causes severe wear to conventional grinding equipment.
- Strict purity requirements: Any introduction of metal impurities would reduce product whiteness and electrical performance.
- Particle size distribution control: The final product was required to have a very narrow particle size distribution to ensure high filling efficiency in downstream applications.
Epic Powder Solution: MQW 20 Fluidized Bed Jet Mill
Based on the physical characteristics of quartz and the customer’s capacity requirements, Epic Powder provided the MQW 20 Fluidized Bed Jet Mill along with its complete supporting system.
Technical Highlights
- Full ceramic protection
To withstand the strong abrasiveness of quartz and ensure zero metal contamination, the feeding system, classifier wheel, and internal liners were fully protected with alumina ceramic (or zirconia ceramic) materials. - Autogenous grinding principle
The MQW series uses high-speed airflow to accelerate quartz particles, causing intense particle-to-particle collisions at airflow convergence zones. Since grinding occurs between particles rather than between particles and machine surfaces, equipment wear is significantly reduced and service life is greatly extended. - High-precision turbo classification
The MQW 20 is equipped with a high-performance horizontal classifier wheel that accurately removes oversized particles, ensuring stable control of D97 at 10 μm.
Implementation Results
After on-site commissioning and stable operation, the performance of the MQW 20 exceeded customer expectations:
| Key Parameters | Target Requirements | Actual Results |
|---|---|---|
| Processed material | High-purity quartz | High-purity quartz |
| Final fineness (D97) | 10 μm | Stably achieved 9.8 μm |
| Particle size distribution | Uniform and narrow | Steep distribution curve with excellent consistency |
| Equipment wear resistance | High wear resistance | Core components operated for 500+ hours with no noticeable wear |
| Metal impurity increase | ≤ 5 ppm | No detectable metal contamination |
Project Value
The successful delivery of this Brazilian project once again demonstrates the leading position of Epic Powder’s MQW series in the processing of hard non-metallic minerals.
With the MQW 20 jet mill, the customer successfully produced ultrafine quartz powder meeting electronic-grade standards, significantly enhancing product competitiveness and pricing power in the South American market.