The actual advances in mineral processing technologies aim mainly to increase the supply of newly mined metals and to reduce the cost of enrichment process. In this contest, the silicon solar grade SoG as feedstock for photovoltaic applications required a high purity. Its cycle of production consists firstly of enriching the silica by acid leaching, which is a suitable method for enriching silica sand and also can be realized at low temperature with low energy consumption and simple instruments.
Fluoride acid (HF) is currently used as leachant agent for its reactivity with silica, and other eventual acids can be used successively, to improve the silica enrichment. The most influencing parameters on silica leaching are leaching time and particles sand size.
Our work consists of the study of etching behavior of silica with HF, since this acid can significantly etch silica sand and change its particles size.
Thus, we have studied etching effect on particle granulometric size during a primary step of leaching process on Algerian silica sand with HF at 20% during 2, 4 and 6 hours. Therefore, a new granulometric classification of the sand is noted. Particles with proportional high size are the latest influenced and the mass loss is increased with time of leaching.
