TiWest opens its doors to the public
Posted on Friday, 21 October 2011
TiWest recently celebrated an open day at its Chandala Processing Site, throwing its doors open to the community and giving an insight into their operation.
The Chandala complex, which is located just north of Muchea, includes three major plants - a dry mill, which separates the minerals, a synthetic rutile plant, which upgrades ilmenite into high quality synthetic rutile and a residue management plant.
The dry mill uses a range of different processes to separate the various types of sands, using the inherent mineral characteristics of electrical conductivity and magnetic susceptibility, particle size and specific gravity. Through these processes, TiWest produces approximately 420,000 tonnes of ilmenite, 70,000 tonnes of zircon, 35,000 tonnes of rutile and 20,000 tonnes of leucoxene a year.
While the zircon, rutile and leucoxene are either bagged or sold in bulk, the ilmenite is further processed into synthetic rutile in three stages at Chandala's synthetic rutile plant - reduction, aeration and acid leaching.
In this process, a residue of activated carbon is also produced as a by-product and packaged for sale.
Of the 230,000 tonnes of synthetic rutile produced at Chandala each year, about half is exported. The remainder is sent to the Kwinana Pigment Plant to be converted into titanium dioxide pigment.
Operating at six sites in Western Australia, TiWest has established one of the most efficient operations in the industry and they great pride in showing their work to local school children, staff family member’s and local business and community leaders.