Sunday 25 February 2018

Sunday in Minneapolis

I registered early for the SME Meeting this morning, after a very cold minus 9 C half mile walk from my hotel to the Convention Centre.
Later in the morning it was a balmy minus 6 so I took a long walk along the western bank of the Mississippi River. Minneapolis is a very attractive city, helped a great deal today by the blue sky and sunshine, and yesterday's heavy snowfall.

Many people have been delayed by yesterday's bad weather, so there was noticeably fewer people at the late afternoon reception and exhibition opening. It will be interesting to see what the turnout is like during the week, and how it compares with previous years.

Friday 23 February 2018

Much good news at the Redruth mining sundowner

Last night's February Cornish Mining Sundowner was held at the Trefusis Arms in the historic mining town of Redruth. Amongst the regulars were owners of two of Cornwall's most progressive companies, Nick Wilshaw of Grinding Solutions Ltd, a sponsor of Comminution '18, and James Strongman of Petrolab Ltd, a sponsor of Process Mineralogy '18GSL, who are currently looking to employ more mineral processors for their rapidly expanding business, will be teaming up with Petrolab and others in April to run a one day seminar immediately prior to Comminution '18 in Cape Town. It was also good to see Phil Hingston, of Bisha Mining, Eritrea, and his wife Josephine, and mining entrepreneur Nick Clarke, and his wife Pauline, who recently bought a house in Falmouth.
Barry Wills, Steve Pendray, Pete Shepherd, Nick Wilshaw, James Strongman and Phil Hingston

Josephine Hingston, Barbara Wills, Pauline and Nick Clarke, Bill Hussey,
Alan Matthews, Bentley Orchard and Linda Matthews
Redruth was one of the wealthiest towns in the UK in the 19th century, being the  centre of Cornwall’s former copper and tin mining industry, then the world's largest and richest metal mining area. Although those halcyon days are long passed, there was good news last night of the resurgence of Cornwall's minerals industry.
The Camborne School of Mining was formed in 1888, but the mining school at Redruth preceded it by about 6 years. In 1910 the Redruth and Penzance mining schools were merged with the Camborne school to form the Camborne School of Metalliferous Mining, the modern CSM.  At the last sundowner there was a rumour of mineral processing coming back to CSM, and it was great to hear last night that this is no longer a rumour.  There will be two MSc courses  launched this year, and both have just received full programme approval. One is a one year full-time mineral processing course to be based on the campus which will start in Sept 2018.  This will be open to a wide range of graduates in geology, mining, chemical engineering, or other similar subjects, wishing to specialise in this area. The other course is a three year professional MSc with a significant component on minerals processing, which will start in January 2019.
The great era of Cornish tin mining ended in 1998 with the closure of the South Crofty mine between Camborne and Redruth. Now everyone is optimistic that mining will soon commence again at this old mine. Strongbow Exploration, the Canadian company that is seeking to revive tin production in Cornwall, plans to list this year on London’s AIM exchange for growing companies to raise development funding. Tin prices have been climbing around 8 percent so far this year to nearly $22,000, compared with roughly $5,000 when South Crofty closed and a peak of $33,600 recorded in 2011. There is a high demand for tin now, which has multiple industrial uses, including in electronics.
Strongbow's aim is to get production back in 2021, and the mine has sufficient tin for at least eight years of mine life, although industry sources say the high quality, super-giant lode could carry on producing for decades. It is estimated that around 275 direct jobs and four times that number of indirect roles could be created. The current major project is dewatering the mine and treating the water, and the Environment Agency has issued a permit for the discharge of up to 25,000 cubic metres of treated water into the nearby Red River, which reaches the sea near Gwithian on the north coast; the company estimates that the water will be removed by the end of 2020.
An added bonus for Cornish mining is that Strongbow also has a mineral rights agreement with British company Cornish Lithium, which means it will get royalties from any lithium extracted from brine springs in the area. High levels of lithium readings were first recognised in 1864 in water flowing into Cornish mines, but there was then no market for this lightest of metals, and when the mines in Cornwall closed it was largely forgotten. Now lithium, vital for rechargeable batteries, has been named a strategically important mineral for the UK by the Government because of its importance for developing industries and its scarcity. At present, it is mainly mined in remote parts of Chile, Australia and Nevada in the USA but without a home grown source of lithium the UK would be vulnerable to shortfall as global demand increases. Cornish Lithium, led by Camborne School of Mines graduate Jeremy Wrathall, has secured the rights to develop and extract, via deep drill holes, the lithium deposits under Cornwall, undertaking the largest, single unified exploration project in the county's history, the vast deposits having the potential to unleash a new major industry in the county.
So, much to look forward to as Cornwall's mining heritage takes on a new life. Hopefully more news and gossip at the next sundowner, which will be at the Portreath Arms, in the North Cornwall village of Portreath, on March 22nd.
Twitter @barrywills

Monday 19 February 2018

Recycling: minerals engineering's greatest challenge

Whether it be plastics or metals, recycling is very much in the news these days. And so it should be, as it is a crucial area of the move towards a circular economy, where nothing is wasted (although thermodynamics teaches us that this is impossible), and at the end of the life of a commodity, the constituent components are recycled back into the closed loop.
Minerals engineering will play a leading role in attempting to make the throw away society, the linear economy, obsolete and our Sustainable Minerals '18 conference in Namibia in June will focus on the efforts that mineral processors and extractive metallurgists are making to reduce wastes, reprocess existing wastes, and the greatest challenge of them all, recycling.
Recycling is viewed by many as the panacea of sustainability. Once an article has reached the end of its useful life, you take it to a municipal waste centre, and it is recycled for further use. This is fine for products made from a single material such as glass, which can be melted down and reused, or for certain metals which are used in their native form, such as copper. Although the demand for copper is such that over 20 million tonnes of the metal is produced each year from primary orebodies, around 50% of the copper that is used in Europe is recycled and the energy required to recycle copper is roughly 85% less than from primary production.
However when metals are alloyed with other metals or non-metals, recycling becomes much more challenging due to complex functional material linkages.   A United  Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report on metal recycling includes a great analogy: imagine making your morning coffee. With the right tools, it’s easy to combine the water, coffee, milk and sugar to create your drink (similar to a linear economy). But if you had to separate it again into the original four ingredients (as required by a circular economy), that would be rather challenging.
If the metals and other elements are in tiny amounts in a device, then the problem becomes even more complex, and perhaps the greatest recycling challenge is that of recovering metals from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), (electric) vehicles and other complex high-tech products. Each year the world generates some 50 million tons of electronic waste, ranging from batteries to mobile phones, computers etc, and although such devices may have been discarded, they are not without value—the United Nations recently estimated the total worth of all that e-waste at $55 billion, thanks largely to the trace amounts of gold, silver, and other metals they contain.
Some of these metals, such as germanium and gallium, are dependent on their primary production on base metal mining, from which they are by-products. Indium, now critical to our modern lifestyle, is the most important ingredient, as an indium-tin oxide,  in the production of ubiquitous touch screens. Indium is produced in small amounts from the mining of Zn ores, and the sheer number of smart phones, tablets etc. produced each year requires around 700 tonnes per year of indium. Recent estimates however, suggest that total reserves are around 16,000 tonnes, so it is a very finite resource, and great efforts are being made to recycle it and other "Hi-Tech Metals", as will be discussed by Prof. Jens Gutzmer at Hi-Tech Metals '18 in Cape Town in November.
It is unfortunate that the working philosophy of most mobile phone manufacturers is planned obsolescence,  the average smartphone life cycle in Britain now being under two years and the number of mobile phone users in the world is expected to pass the five billion mark by 2019. A smart phone contains around half the elements of the periodic table, so global efforts are needed to improve the design of components in electrical and electronic equipment to facilitate reuse and recycling and the better recovery of precious metals.
One mobile phone manufacturer which is taking a lead on this is the Dutch company Fairphone, who is taking steps to increase the life of its Fairphone 2, and has enlisted the help of two world experts on recycling, simulation and life-cycle assessment to assess the best way of recycling the phone to recover the maximum amount of contained metals. Dr. Antoinette van Schaik, of MARAS BV, The Netherlands, and Prof. Markus Reuter, the Director of the Helmholtz Institute for Resource Technology, Germany, have worked together for many years on the simulation of recycling systems, including life-cycle assessment and the circular economy (linking product design with physical and metallurgical processing). Markus is MEI's consultant for the Sustainable Minerals conferences, and he was recently awarded the degree of Doctor of Engineering (DEng), honoris causa, by his alma  mater, The University of Stellenbosch, for his outstanding contributions to the science and technology of the production and recycling of metals, as well as to the integration of academic research and practice. His work on recycling, design for recycling, and resource efficiency has contributed towards the creation of processes and tools to develop a sustainable society.
van Schaik and Reuter
Antoinette and Markus used simulation software designed by Sustainable Minerals '18 sponsor Outotec to create models of how all the different elements, alloys, plastics and materials associations in the Fairphone 2 behave in the best recycling technologies available today and which existing techniques could offer the highest recovery rates. Markus will present and discuss their findings at Sustainable Minerals '18. The basis of this work has been published in Minerals Engineering over the years and has now found its path into Outotec’s HSC Sim, considering uniquely the full “mineral” properties of products and scrap to understand how these pass through physical separation and metallurgical processing systems of the Circular Economy.
Recycling and innovative new business models are without doubt society's greatest challenges, and mineral processing and extractive metallurgy will be at the forefront of meeting these challenges, so please do join us in Namibia in June for Sustainable Minerals '18, which runs back to back with Biohydrometallurgy '18, also very much involved with the move towards the circular economy. Then in Cape Town in November, Hi-Tech Metals '18 will present the latest developments in the primary and secondary processing of the metals which are now essential elements of our modern society.
Events not to be missed by progressive modern minerals engineers!
Twitter @barrywills

Sunday 18 February 2018

Minneapolis 2018 is only a week away

The 2018 SME Annual Conference and Expo begins next week in Minneapolis, and I look forward to being there and reporting on mineral processing people, news and innovation.
This is one of the industry's great meeting places and I never have a particular agenda, spending most of my time strolling around the many exhibits and basically seeing what happens.
So if you are in Minneapolis next week and have any involvement with mineral processing and extractive metallurgy, please let me know and we can arrange a time to meet and hopefully highlight your news in my report, which will be published on the blog no later than Monday 5th March.
Updates on the meeting can be found on Twitter at #SME2018ACE.
Twitter @barrywills

Friday 16 February 2018

Memories of Comminution '98

The 11th in the series of international comminution conferences, Comminution '18, begins in Cape Town in 2 months' time. The first in the series was held 29 years ago at the School of Mines in Camborne, and the only available photo is that below. Can anyone supply any names?
Barry Wills (centre) and Phil Newall (2nd right) of CSM, with Trelleborg delegates at Comminution '89
The 2nd in the series commenced 20 years ago today in Brisbane, Australia. Organised by CSM Associates, Camborne School of Mines, Minerals Engineering journal, Mining Journal Ltd, the JKMRC, and the Comminution Center, University of Utah, it was sponsored by Eriez Magnetics, Australia and Warman International. Below are a few photos taken at the event.
Peter King, BW and Tim Napier-Munn

John Mosher and friend, Jannie van Deventer, BW and J-P Franzidis

With Barbara Wills, Joan Oliver of CSM Associates, and
Linda Shimmield, secretary of CSM Association
 Twitter @barrywills

Thursday 15 February 2018

The Journey from Mineralogy through Validation to Control and Optimisation

With on-site automated mineralogy, increased computing speed and ruggedised sensors the dream of monitoring and controlling mineral processing plants using mineralogy rather than chemistry is fast becoming a reality.
Current mineralogical analysis allows users to determine the mineralogical composition of mineral samples, indicate mineral associations and mineral particle sizes. This data enables an initial evaluation of the sample, giving indicative liberation sizes and possible mineral recoveries and grades. This data is augmented with targeted laboratory trials to validate predictive models and linking metallurgy to mineralogy. In conjunction with advanced sensors and control software this then enables monitoring, controlling and optimising the process in real time.
The combination of initial analysis, through validation to model development and final implementation via a “Big Data” platform brings the opportunity for plants to maximise their financial gains by maintaining operations at near optimal conditions. This will be the basis of a free seminar, immediately prior to Comminution '18, on 15th April at the Vineyard Hotel, Cape Town, hosted by conference sponsor Grinding Solutions Ltd, showing the journey that Grinding Solutions and their partners Zeiss, iMin Solutions and IntelliSense.io believe is the future.
This is an open event catering for both MEI Comminution ‘18 conference attendees and any other industry professionals and follows on from a very successful mineral processing seminar hosted in Portugal in September 2017.
The Grinding Solutions seminar in Portugal in September 2017
Further information on the presentations will be available nearer to the time following sign-up and will also be available on the Grinding Solutions Website.
Twitter @barrywills

Tuesday 13 February 2018

Mighty Metso continues its support of MEI Conferences

Metso is well known to all in the minerals industry. It is a world-leading industrial company, with operations in 50 countries and 12,000 dedicated professionals, offering equipment and services for the sustainable processing and flow of natural resources in the mining, aggregates, recycling and process industries.
So we welcome the company's confirmation of sponsorship of Comminution '18 and Flotation '19, the 5th time that Metso has sponsored each of these conference series in Cape Town.
Current Comminution '18 sponsors

Current Flotation '19 sponsors

Monday 12 February 2018

A Rising Star: Martin Rudolph

Dr. Martin Rudolph is a very worthy addition to our Rising Stars series. He has presented noteworthy papers at the past three MEI Flotation Conferences, where he has impressed us with his enthusiasm and professionalism. For over two years he has been a very conscientious reviewer for Minerals Engineering papers, and it was an easy decision to appoint him as one of the six Assistant Editors for the new-look journal (posting of 22 January).
Martin Rudolph (right) receiving a best poster award at Flotation '17,
on behalf of two of his PhD students
Martin is 34 years old, and was born close to the city of Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) in the former German Democratic Republic. He is Head of the Processing Department at the Helmholtz Institute for Resource Technology (HIF) of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) a federal non-university research organization where he is also a principal investigator. He joined HIF in April 2012 shortly after it was founded as the national centre for resource technology research. He is also a lecturer at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg.
At Elfusa, Brazil, 2006
In 2003 Martin enrolled at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg, the oldest mining academy in the world, in the diploma course in Process Engineering and would later specialise in Particle Technology after one year of mandatory military service with the medical corps.  As part of his studies, in 2006 he spent three months as an intern for mineral processing in Sao Joao da Boa Vista, Brazil with the company Elfusa. He then spent six months at the company Heidelberger Druckmaschinen in Heidelberg, Germany and studied particle adhesion effects, and was awarded by the company in 2007 for his work.
He finished his studies as a Dipl.-Ing. which is equivalent to an M.Sc,  his diploma thesis being with the Fraunhofer Institute of Nondestructive Testing on the dispersion of Detonation-synthesized Nanodiamonds (DNDs) in Aqueous Suspension for the synthesis of highly stable colloidal dispersion, which he achieved with a planetary ball mill. Although he meant to continue with Fraunhofer as a PhD student, in 2008 Prof. Urs Peuker from the University Karlsruhe and TU Clausthal was appointed to the TU Bergakademie Freiberg to lead the famous Institute of Mechanical Process Engineering and Mineral Processing, lead by Prof. Heinrich Schubert. Martin had developed a special interest in nanoparticle systems and interfacial phenomena and Prof. Peuker had a wonderful project which he was then working on. The project, funded by the German Research Foundation, offered Martin a lot freedom to develop his interest in interfaces and colloidal systems, and Urs Peuker became his PhD supervisor. His PhD on “Nanoparticle-Polymer-Composites the solution and spray drying process with an emphasis on colloidal interactions” was defended in December 2012.
Martin with Urs after he defended his thesis with the highest distinction “summa cum laude
Martin being pulled through the streets of Freiberg by his PhD supervisor Urs
Martin published and presented many papers as a PhD student and received the first prize in the International Young Scientist Competition in St. Petersburg, Russia at the Gornyi Institute (Mining Institute) in April 2012, in the section of nanotechnologies.
Originally he and his wife had intended to spend some time in the US as Post-Docs but their son was born in 2011 and he took the offer from his supervisor to become one of the first engineers in the newly founded HIF.
I asked Martin what had inspired him to take up a career in mineral processing and he said that at first he was interested in the process of flotation because of his experience in interfacial phenomena and using modern interface analytical tools such as atomic force microscopy or inverse gas chromatography, this being the main focus of the processing department of the newly founded HIF, which he built up with the help of a few students. He discovered how important Freiberg had been in mineral processing, and especially in flotation, with Prof. Heinrich Schubert at TU Bergakademie Freiberg and Dr. Hans Joachim Schulze at the Freiberg Mineral Research Institut, the Forschungs-Institut Aufbereitungstechnik (FIA) of the East German Academy of Sciences, later with the Max Planck Foundation. He found that the processing issues for the beneficiation of fine particles and especially the complex mineral systems was so much more fascinating than the “clean” synthetic nanoparticle systems he had been dealing with before. He was also pleased to stumble into a truly interdisciplinary team of geologists, mathematicians, metallurgists, biologists, physicists and chemists at HIF and the HZDR, opening many opportunities to develop innovative ideas and to thoroughly study the micro-processes in mineral processing. Even more, he realised how important and critical their work is when he began to appreciate the societal need for understanding metalliferous resources, especially with our complex high tech products these days. With that understanding he has a strong motivation to produce a  positive impact on the world through improving technology and at the same time dealing with unresolved questions of science, such as hydrophobic interactions.
In his early days as a mineral processing scientist he initiated a fruitful dialogue at the IMPC 2012 in New Delhi between Prof. Jan Miller, of the University of Utah, and Prof. Roe-Hoan Yoon, of Virginia Tech, when Jan was presenting molecular dynamic results and a gap between a hydrophobic surface and condensed water, which ended with several people in the audience openly philosophising about the nature of hydrophobic interactions, so crucial in flotation and so poorly understood. Later he continued such discussion with Roe-Hoan, who was visiting Freiberg in 2013. The next highlight was his very first MEI flotation conference, Flotation '13 in Cape Town, where "I fell in love with a wonderful mineral processing community which I more and more got into in the following years".
In April 2016 the HIF finally moved to the newly renovated building on the ground of the former FIA with "perfect laboratories and wonderful infrastructure". Martin's group has grown to two technical assistants and ten PhD students and they are currently seeking a PostDoc and another technical assistant to run the MLA and QEMSCAN analyses in mineral processing.
With Particle Technology students, 2008
Last year the group started a bioflotation project together with AMTC in Santiago Chile (Willy Kracht’s group) that created much public interest. Furthermore they have just completed their EU Horizon 2020 project OptimOre coordinated by UPC in Spain together with colleagues from Spain, the UK, Sweden and Freiberg where they have had the chance to study interesting tungsten and tantalum ores and also perform industrial tests with a mine and concentrator in Austria. In November a fundamental project started on the development of a new cell concept for the multi parameter fractionation (size, shape and wettability) of ultrafine synthetic and natural particles (below 10 µm) combining intensified turbulent flotation and foam fractionation.
The highlight of last year was a two month visiting scholarship with his family in Perth, Australia, where his wife Julia Walther (PhD in biomedical engineering) stayed at the University of Western Australia and Martin was at the Chemical Engineering Department of Curtin University, where he was able to study and model fundamental effects of the dynamic adsorption of special frother molecules and the influence of kosmotropic and chaotropic salts. He  also took the opportunity to visit Western Australia’s mining school in Kalgoorlie and the fascinating Superpit mine there.
With his family in Perth, 2017
I asked him what were his plans for the near future and his aspirations for the long term, and his near future plan is to write his second dissertation to be able to become a professor and to further develop the expertise of his group and the HIF.
Outside his work, Martin is very much a family man, spending his time outside work with his wife Julia and their six year old son and three year old daughter. He says "my family means a lot to me and having kids is by far the most important “project” of my life. In the summertime we keep a garden (community garden) with a nice cottage in the city forest of Dresden. For my personal pleasure I go running and participate in running events typically on the 10K or half marathon distance but in 2009 I successfully finished a full marathon (time: 03:18:30). Further interests of mine are photography, travelling the world (most memorably was three weeks through Iceland with my wife) and music, with a broad taste from singer/songwriter stuff to punk, hardcore and metal, regularly attending shows in small venues, singing along, dancing heavily and sweating at the end!"
Completing a half marathon in Dresden, 2017
Martin Rudolph is obviously a highly motivated scientist, who has his life-style priorities sorted out, and who I am sure we will hear much more of in the future. He is a true "Rising Star".
#Twitter @barrywills

Thursday 8 February 2018

Tuesday 6 February 2018

Avoiding the harsh Cornish winter!

My very first posting on this blog was in February 2009, when I reported on a very rare occurrence: snow in Cornwall!
I have been looking forward to its return since then, and this week there was a very light dusting, which lasted a few hours before the rain set in again. Unfortunately I missed it, as Barbara and I are in Lanzarote this week, the most easterly of the Canary Islands and only 125 km from the African coast.
Although inland the scenery is bleak, with lunar landscapes, in the south of the island, where we are based, there are golden sands beaches reminiscent of Cornwall.





Monday 5 February 2018

Report on Canadian Mineral Processors Annual Meeting 2018

The Canadian Mineral Processors (CMP) conference is held every year in the same location, the Westin Hotel in Ottawa. It is one of the world's largest gatherings of mineral processors, mainly representing Canada.
Approximately 600 delegates attended the 50th annual national meeting of the CMP last month – a record attendance, and I thank Dr. Norman Lotter, of Flowsheets Metallurgical Consulting Inc., for this short report on the event.
Jonna Muinonen
The conference was opened by Jonna Muinonen, president of the 2017-2018 session, and VP-Operations for Royal Nickel.  The theme was “Past, Present and Future”, reflecting on the 50-year history of the conference.
The conference saw a strong showing of technical papers, ranging from reviews of technology development across the last five decades, to a session focussed on gold processing, in which Gekko and Curtin University reported the development and successful commissioning of “Carbon Scout”, a carbon concentration meter which, combined with SIMCIL, a carbon process simulator which models optimum set point on a regular basis, reduces soluble gold losses from the carbon circuit. The paper was presented by Greg Rasmussen, VP of Gekko Systems, Vancouver.
The awards banquet recognised several mineral processors for their contributions to the profession. For the first time in the history of the conference, a double award was made for the Mineral Processor of the Year to Glenn Dobby and Glenn Kosick, of Woodgrove Technologies, Ontario, for their development of the Staged Flotation Reactor.  Honorary Life Membership was awarded to Ken Major of Vancouver for his many contributions to the conference.  Best paper of the 2017 conference went to Jean-Francois Dupont, of Detour Gold Mining Co., North Ontario, for his paper on the effect of choke-feeding a gyratory crusher on throughput and product size.
Norman Lotter, of Flowsheets Metallurgical Consulting Inc., Canada, presented a 50-year review of the history and current standing of process mineralogy.  He is shown together with Alexa Cattani, of Welco Expediters, and John Eggert (right), of Eggert Engineering.
The organising committee and contributing authors are to be congratulated on an excellent conference.
Norman Lotter

Saturday 3 February 2018

A chance encounter in Lanzarote

Barbara and I are on our annual winter break in the Canary Islands, this year on the volcanic island of Lanzarote. As well as relaxing for 10 days I am also starting to think of preparation of an article on the challenges of metal recycling, something which we will hear much about at Sustainable Minerals '18 in June.
So it was ironic that, while strolling along the Playa Blanca seafront this morning we should bump into an old student of mine, Mark Wolle, who graduated in mineral processing from CSM in 1978. Born and raised in our home town of Falmouth, Mark is CEO of E3 Recycling Ltd in Port Talbot, Wales, which specialises in WEEE, computer recycling and PC disposals.
Always a hands-on mineral processor, Mark told me of some of the practical problems of recycling metals and plastics from WEEE using standard mineral processing machinery, such as DMS and shaking tables. Although there are marked density differences between metals and plastics, one of the major problems is associated with the irregular shapes of pulverised particles, but the company is about to commission a new plant which they hope will overcome many of the hurdles.

Thursday 1 February 2018

We welcome iMin Solutions Ltd as a sponsor of Process Mineralogy '18

In 2014 we welcomed a new sponsor to the Process Mineralogy series of conferences,  Melbourne based MinAssist, a progressive young company offering services to the minerals industry in the interpretation of mineralogical information. MinAssist was founded by Dr. Will Goodall, who was involved with Brisbane-based Intellection in the early days of QEMSCAN technology, as was one of our keynote speakers at Process Mineralogy '18, Prof. Alan Butcher.

Will Goodall and Zeiss's Al Cropp at Process Mineralogy '14

At Process Mineralogy '17 another progressive young company joined us as a sponsor, Cornwall's Petrolab, led by James Strongman.

Petrolab's Chris Brough and James Strongman, with Alan Butcher, at Process Mineralogy '17

In 2015 Will and James teamed up to form iMin Solutions Ltd, with the aim of bringing greater mineralogical capability directly to the mine site and mineral processing plant, and we welcome this collaborative company as a sponsor of Process Mineralogy '18. iMin Solutions is also teamed up with fellow conference sponsor ZEISS, working to provide end to end data interpretation and analytical solutions for mine sites, and Petrolab developing technology specifically for automated mineralogy based applications on the mine site and in the laboratory.
Current Process Mineralogy '18 sponsors
#ProcessMineralogy18