Abstract

Manganese sulfate is widely used in electrolytic manganese production, catalysts, batteries, and other fields. However, the preparation of manganese sulfate from conventional roasting process of pyrolusite with additive of pyrite has disadvantages including long roasting time and low efficiency. Thus, microwave heating is used as an alternative for the preparation of manganese sulfate instead of traditional heating to destroy the dense structure of minerals and to further improve the heating efficiency which is dominating by dielectric properties of the material. Therefore, to evaluate the mechanism of preparation of manganese sulfate with microwave heating, experiments were carried out to explore the dielectric and thermochemical properties of pyrolusite-pyrite mixture at high temperature. The dielectric properties of pyrolusite-pyrite mixtures with different ratios were measured at high temperature using the resonant cavity perturbation technique, which has been widely used to study the dielectric properties of different metallurgical materials. It was found that with the increase of temperature, the microwave absorption properties of pure pyrolusite decreased from 28.173 F/M to 25.931 F/M. The wave-absorbing property of the soft pyrite/pyrite mixture increased to 41.218 F/M, indicating that pyrite can obviously improve the wave-absorbing property of the mixture. In addition, the characteristics of pyrolysis and reduction were studied systematically, and the pyrolysis and reduction process was divided into four stages according to the difference of temperature: 30 ℃-200 ℃, 200 ℃-400 ℃, 400 ℃-600 ℃, 600 ℃-900 ℃, corresponding to the separation of adsorbed water and bound water, MnO₂ decomposition, desulfurization redox reaction of FeS₂ and desulfurization redox reaction of Fe(1-x) S, respectively. This work highlights the possibility of reducing manganese ore by microwave heating with an additive of pyrite and finds that pyrite can modify the microwave absorption properties of pyrolusite.