A dolomite processor in Turkey called us early last year. He was supplying powder to a flat glass manufacturer. His dolomite looked fine on the surface – white, consistent, around 54% CaO and 40% MgO. But every few weeks the glass plant would reject a truckload. The problem? Gray streaks in the finished glass.
He traced it back to his feed material. The quarry had pockets of sandstone and iron-stained dolomite. These impurities looked almost the same as good dolomite when crushed. But in the glass furnace, they created dark haze or thin gray lines. His customer didn't care about the geology. They just stopped buying from him for two months.
He tried hand sorting at the crusher. That meant hiring eight men to stand over a slow conveyor belt and pick out the slightly darker rocks. They caught maybe half of the bad pieces. The other half went through and ended up in his mill. He spent $4,000 a month on that line and still got complaints.
That's when he found us. We run a small factory in Hefei making optical sorters for industrial minerals. We've done dolomite before but every deposit is different. He sent us a hundred kilos of his crushed material – 10 to 30 millimeters, mixed with maybe 5% off-color pieces.
Our test machine is just a standard 600 sorter with a belt and air jets. The first pass was disappointing. The good dolomite and the iron-stained pieces were too close in color. Our camera kept mixing them up. We ended up adding an infrared sensor – something we'd used on quartz before. The IR picks up the iron oxide signature better than visible light.
After two days of adjusting thresholds, we got the numbers we wanted: the machine pulled out 93% of the stained pieces while losing only 2% of the good dolomite. The customer flew out to Hefei, watched the test, and ordered a machine on the spot.
He's been running it for nine months now. His reject rate from the glass plant dropped to almost nothing. And he cut his hand sorting crew from eight men to two – just to feed the machine and check the rejects.
If you have dolomite with similar problems – off-white particles, iron stains, or chunks of quartz that look too pale – you can send us a sample. We don't charge for the test. You just pay the shipping. We'll run it through our sorter and send you a video. No sales pitch. Just the results.
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