In some deposits valuable heavy mineral quality is poor due to increased mineral surface coatings from higher slimes and more competent sand orebodies._x000D_
Mineral surface coating can include silica or aluminium rich clay minerals and iron based minerals that render the final product quality off-specification, in this case specifically ilmenite and zircon. Conventional physical beneficiation processes such as magnetic separation, electrostatic separation and gravity separation are not able to remove these surface coatings. Surface dependent separation techniques such as electrostatic separators are affected by these coatings which hinders the rejection of non-valuable mineral from product._x000D_
Attrition scrubbing is the most commonly used technique to reduce surface coatings, using mechanically induced particle to particle interaction, abrasion and shearing.In many cases it is a challenge to measure the surface removal efficiency of these scrubbing units. Elemental analysis techniques (ie X-ray flourescence) (XRF) in a multi mineral environment are unable to measure surface impurity reduction with enough precision._x000D_
Mineralogical analysis (in this case Qemscan) has constraints in terms of sample preparation with highly coated particles being plucked out during block polishing. This paper suggests a combination of laboratory separation techniques coupled with elemental analysis to evaluate the surface removal efficiency._x000D_
Three different types of feed materials were used to analyse the efficiency of surface removal using production attritioner scrubbers. This approach relates the downstream beneficiation plant's expected performance with that of the attrition scrubber's scrubbing efficiency._x000D_
FORMAL CITATION:Maluleke, O S and Grobler, J D, 2011. Attritioner scrubber performance evaluation, in Proceedings Eighth International Heavy Minerals Conference 2011, pp 185-196 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).