Quarts Processing Plant - CeyQuart, Mathale, Sri Lanka

Cey Quartz

Location

Cey Quartz MBI (PVT) LTD is situated in Naula Mathale District Central province in Sri Lanka. There are some reasons for locating the plantation in Naula like a rural area.

  • Provide employments for villagers
  • Develop the Naula area
  • Easy to access the Mahagama Quartz mine


About the plantation

Cey quartz MBI (PVT) LTD belongs to the private sector. They only export the grinded quartz. They are not providing quartz to the local market. Earlier they exported quartz as raw material. Currently, Sri Lankan government enacts   an act for export raw material. There is no authority to export raw material without any value addition. Therefore currently they conduct certain stages to add value addition to raw quartz.Quartz travels from different area of Sri Lanka to the plantation.
  • Wellawaya
  • Badulla
  • Galaha
  • Anuradhapura Horowpathana
  • Mathale Raththota
  • Sigirimulla etc
The company has started in 2000.They are exporting two major products. They are,
  • Quartz powder (micron sizes)
  • Quartz Grit (millimeter sizes)
Main markets: North America South America Eastern Europe Southeast Asia
They provide above 98% pure SiO2.

Processing

The mines department of the company is doing the major role in the process. At the very first stage, they are exploring the quartz deposits which are located in Sri Lanka using Mineral maps and satellites images of Geological Survey and Mines Bureau (GSMB). Then they have to get several permits before initiating the mining such as GSMB permit, the permit of the land owner, environmental permit, the permit of an archeological department, permit for do blasting, and permit from local government authorities etc. Not only that they should have both Technical mining permit and Industrial mining permit. After getting the permits, they are considering two major things. They are,
  • How much can extract from the mine
  • How much can efficiently use
In the quarry,
  • First excavate and remove overburden
  • Then Drilling
  • Blast using blasting powder, dynamite, detonators, fuel (coal)
  • Sort out blasted quartz using human workers
  • Using chipping hammer break quartz into chips
  • The final outputs of quarry are lumps and chips
Bring quarry outputs to the Naula cey Quartz plantation.
In the plantation,
  • Stored the Quarry outputs in stockyard according to the chemical parameters. Mainly considering the Cl content.
  • Then dust is removing by washing in a washing line. For that using low conductivity water
  • After that manually remove the unwanted materials for the production such as feldspar
  • Then the output send to a chamber to dry. Fans are using for that.
  • The output of the drying chamber stored in metal bins as inputs for grinding process. Inside of the metal bins have coated using thick cylex stones layer to minimize the direct contact of metal with the quartz 
  • Then the stored quartz feed to the ball mill to grind. The factory owns three ball mills 
  • Finally the output of the ball mills are sending to sieve. The particle sizes separately in this stage.

  • 1 – 3 inches particle size
  • 3 – 5 inches particle size
  • 5 < inches particle size
Also, they are using magnet bars to remove metal particles further
In the laboratory, following tests are conducted
  • Coarse particle test
  • Electrical conductivity test
  • Ph test
  • Cl test