Mineral dressing, also known as ore dressing or mineral processing, is the branch of metallurgy concerned with the physical separation and concentration of valuable minerals from raw mined ore without fundamentally altering the chemical identity of the minerals. The term "dressing" reflects historical practice in which run-of-mine ore was "dressed" — cleaned, sorted, and upgraded — to prepare it for smelting or further refining. The primary operations in mineral dressing include comminution (crushing and grinding to reduce particle size and liberate mineral grains), classification (separating particles by size using screens and cyclones), and concentration (separating valuable minerals from gangue using techniques such as gravity separation, dense media separation, magnetic separation, electrostatic separation, and flotation). In iron ore operations, mineral dressing typically involves primary crushing, scrubbing, screening, and magnetic separation to produce a high-grade iron concentrate or lump/fines product for export. Bauxite dressing focuses on removing clay, silica, and other deleterious materials through washing and attrition scrubbing. Gold ore dressing traditionally begins with gravity concentration using jigs, spirals, or centrifugal concentrators to capture coarse free gold before the ore proceeds to leaching circuits. Diamond dressing relies on dense media separation, jigging, and X-ray sorting. Mineral dressing is distinct from hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy, which involve chemical transformation of minerals, though modern processing plants integrate all three disciplines.
