Steinert to sponsor Comminution '25 and Physical Separation '26

I think everyone in the mining industry is now well aware of how important sensor-based electronic sorting has become and MEI is pleased to have the continuing involvement of Steinert, one of the leaders in this field. Steinert sponsored two of last year's 4 MEI conferences, Physical Separation '24 and Critical Minerals '24.

A busy Steinert booth at Physical Separation 24.......

.....and at Critical Minerals '24

It is not surprising that Steinert is to sponsor Comminution '25, as sorting waste rock and ore with low concentrations prior to comminution saves energy and water and enriches the grade of the ore.

Steinert's ‘dual energy’ x-ray transmission (XRT) is ideally suited for ore sorting because the x-ray radiation can penetrate stones with particle sizes up to 100 mm, allowing metals to be detected, even when they are not on the surface. 

In addition to XRT, Steinert offers other sensors that can be combined with one another. XRF (x-ray fluorescence) can be used to determine and sort individual chemical elements very precisely and optical sorting and lasers are well suited to the detection of ores with different colours, or crystalline structures.

Steinert is also the first sponsor to sign up for Physical Separation '26. There are many applications of Steinert technology in physical separation.  Electronic sorting has long been used in the recovery of diamonds, X-ray sorting systems screening out diamonds accurately and with high throughput rates at an early stage in the process. In contrast to conventional x-ray luminance processes, Steinert diamond sorting machines use high-resolution x-ray transmission sensors that screen the rock throughout. Detection takes place at the atomic level, and surface impurities do not affect the detection. This solution can be used early in the process in order to remove large diamonds before they are damaged or broken up in the subsequent crusher stages. Near-infrared (NIR) technology is also being used to analyse the complete material stream and reliably separate kimberlite from waste rock. Modern sorters have great advantages over the conventional sink/float process, not only in diamond processing.

We look forward to hearing the latest developments in electronic sorting at Comminution '25 and Physical Separation '26.

#Comminution25
#PhysicalSeparation26

Wishing you all the best for 2025

Five years ago this month I wondered what would be the main issues facing the world and the mining industry in 2020. Predicting the future is an impossible task I said. How true, as 2 months later the world ground to a halt with the onslaught of the Covid pandemic and the cancellation of all major events, including four MEI conferences and the International Mineral Processing Congress in Cape Town.

So I am a little wary now of expressing too much optimism, but I do hope for a year which sees a resurgence in the fortunes of many common metals, whose prices fell in the third quarter of 2024 due to signs of slowing industrial activity in major economies, especially China. 

We look forward to MEI's two major conferences which will be held in Cape Town this year, Comminution '25 and Flotation '25. But before these I will be in Denver next month, representing MEI as a media partner, for the Annual SME Meeting, which will be special this year as it includes the Komar Kawatra Symposium, and is in association with World Gold 2025, which should be well attended as gold is one of the few metals which has not suffered in 2024.

In March Comminution '25 will have a record number of presentations as well as exhibitors. Although the technical programme is now full we are still considering abstracts for poster presentation.

We will be back in Cape Town again in November for Flotation '25, where all the exhibition booths in the main exhibition area are already sold, but we have 7 booths available outside the main conference room. We expect a very full programme here too, so please submit your abstracts by the end of May if you would like to present your work.

The farewell sundowner at Flotation '25 will be a special evening for me, as I hope to celebrate the end of my eighth decade with flotation scientists from around the world, 10 days before my 80th birthday. 

A recent sundowner at the Vineyard Hotel

And thanks to a recent paper in Elsevier's Food Chemistry journal I will be able to relax in the knowledge that I will be celebrating with antioxidant alcohol!! As is well known, one of the reasons that alcohol consumption can contribute to disease is that its metabolism by the liver results in the production of highly reactive oxygen species. Such free radicals can react with and damage cellular components such as fats, proteins and DNA, affecting vital functions of cell membranes and blood vessel walls.

Antioxidants, which neutralise highly reactive free radicals. have been found to be present in several alcoholic drinks. Researchers at the University of Silesia, Poland, tested alcoholic beverages for antioxidant activity by electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy (EPR) using an EMX EPR spectrometer manufactured by Bruker, a regular sponsor of MEI's process mineralogy conferences. EPR is a technique that specifically detects species containing unpaired electrons, such as free radicals. The results clearly showed that some alcoholic beverages exhibit antioxidant properties. Red wines and brandy demonstrated the highest antioxidant activity, followed by whisky. 

So here's to a few glasses of pinotage with friends on November 20th, but in the meantime, with wine glass half full, I wish you all the very best for 2025.

Should we frown on those who enjoy an occasional glass of wine?

#Comminution25
#Flotation25
#MINEXCHANGE2025

2024 with MEI: awards aplenty

Of significance this year has been the number of prestigious awards given to young and old in our profession.

MEI initiated the Young Person's Award in 2011 due to an awareness that virtually all major awards were made predominantly to men (very few women) nearing the end of their careers, and there was little to recognise the achievements of the younger members in our fraternity. It was a pleasure to present the 2023 award last month to Paulina Vallejos in Cape Town and we were proud to see how much this award is now coveted, as Paulina brought her family all the way from Chile to see her presented with the award. 

Paulina Vallejos and family at Process Mineralogy '24 in Cape Town

A month earlier I presented Nikhil Dhawan with the 2019 Award at the International Mineral Processing Congress (IMPC) in USA, belatedly due to the Covid pandemic.

The first recipient of the MEI Young Person's Award was Peter Amelunxen in 2011, and at the February SME Annual Meeting in Phoenix I was pleased to see our faith in Peter validated when he was awarded the SME's prestigious Antoine Gaudin Award. Peter joins some great mineral processors who have been past recipients of this award, including MEI flotation consultant Prof. Jim Finch (1997) and Prof. Doug Fuerstenau (1977), the only person to have been awarded the International Mineral Processing Council's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Distinguished Service Award.

Peter Amelunxen with his proud father, Roger 

The Phoenix meeting was particularly special for me, as I was presented with the Frank Aplan Award, essentially a Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Institute of Mining. Metallurgical and Petroleum  Engineers.

With John Marsden, chairman of the October IMPC,
and Courtney Young, a former Antoine Gaudin Award winner

A previous winner of this award was my old Camborne School of Mines colleague Dr. Dave Osborne, who really kick-started my career by inspiring the writing of Mineral Processing Technology, which led to Minerals Engineering journal and eventually MEI (an interesting story documented in the posting of 10th August 2015). It was great to catch up with Dave and his wife Hazel at the IMPC in Maryland in October.

With Dave and Hazel Osborne at the IMPC

Three more top awards were made at the IMPC. Robin Batterham, Emeritus Kernot Professor of Engineering at the University of Melbourne, Australia received the IMPC's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Robin Batterham and his partner Hanne

The Lifetime Achievement Award was also made to Prof. John Herbst, who unfortunately could not attend the congress, nor could Tim Napier-Munn, who was the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award. I was particularly pleased with Tim's award, as he was the first co-editor of Mineral Processing Technology, for the 7th edition, and Tim and I are two of the four living recipients of this award.

The 8th edition of the book was co-edited by Jim Finch and I was pleased to see Jim and his wife Lois at the IMPC and for Jim to be presented, belatedly due to Covid, with his 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jim and Lois Finch

It was also great to see the recipients of the 2024 IMPC Young Authors' Awards called up to receive their awards, representing the future of mineral processing. Maybe one of these will be the 2024 MEI Young Person's Award winner?

It was also good to see so many young people at my Victor Phillips Memorial Lecture at the University of Exeter's Penryn campus three weeks after the IMPC. Dr. Victor Phillips, a hydrometallurgist, was one of my closest colleagues at Camborne School of Mines so it was a great privilege for me to present this lecture on my 55 years in mineral processing, celebrated that month.

Four months after the SME Meeting in Phoenix the first of MEI's four 2024 conferences were held in Cape Town in June. Due to increasing travel disruption and visa problems due to Brexit, we made the decision in 2023 to move our Falmouth conferences to Cape Town, and Physical Separation '24, the 8th in the series, was for the first time held outside Cornwall. This was immediately followed by a new conference, Mill Circuits '24, which made a good start, which could probably have been better with a less ambiguous name, as many assumed that this referred to grinding mill circuits rather than the more generic use of the name mill for concentrator. So the next conference has been renamed Mineral Processing Circuits' 26 to avoid any confusion!

We were a little worried about moving these conferences from Falmouth, as June is mid-winter in Cape Town, and the weather can be pretty horrendous, as it was in the week preceding the events, and the week after!  Fortunately we were blessed with wonderful weather during the conference week, with some of the sunniest and warmest sundowners that we have experienced in the Vineyard Hotel Gardens.

Physical Separation '24 sundowner

Following the conferences Jon and I returned home, to Luxembourg and Falmouth respectively, while Amanda took the short flight to Namibia for the SAIMM's Rare Earths conference, making the most of the pre-conference time to explore Namibia's amazing dunes.

We were back in Cape Town in November for Process Mineralogy '24, a welcome return to the Mother City after 6 years, due to the trauma of Covid, for this the 7th in the process mineralogy series. This was followed by the inaugural Critical Minerals '24. Process Mineralogy '22 had been held in Sitges, Spain, due to Covid uncertainties in South Africa, and we will be back there in November 2026 for Process Mineralogy '26 and Critical Minerals '26.

With our conference agent Rene Simpson at the Critical Minerals '24 dinner at Groot Constantia.

It has been an interesting year, and we have much to look forward to in 2025, but in the meantime, on behalf of all of us at MEI we wish you all the very best for Christmas and New Year, and a big thank you to all of you who have sent us Christmas greetings by email and post.

Photo courtesy of Tony Clarke

Death of eminent comminution scientist Frank Shi

Very sad news in today from Australia of the death of Franks Shi, Emeritus Professor of the University of Queensland's Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre (JKMRC), and I thank the Director of the JKMRC, Professor Mohsen Yahyaei for his posting on LinkedIn, which provides a background to Frank's life and work.

Prof. Shi's career began as an operator at an iron ore mine in China in 1971, and he joined the JKMRC in 1988 where he has been a research-focused academic, continuously working to improve the energy efficiencies of comminution processes. His expertise covered wide areas including ore and coal breakage characterisation, mathematical modeling of comminution machines and circuits, slurry and flotation froth rheology, and high voltage pulse comminution. He was the chief inventor of the JK Rotary Breakage Tester and the JK size-dependent breakage model, both of which have found significant applications in the mineral and coal industries.

Frank has been the co-author of many papers presented at MEI's comminution conferences, and although he did not travel a great deal he presented work at Comminution '04 in Perth, Australia, and at Comminution '08 in Falmouth, UK. 

Frank Shi (2nd right) at Comminution '04

Frank with JKMRC colleagues at Comminution '08

Frank at the Comminution '08 conference dinner

His pioneering studies on the application of High Voltage Pulse resulted to a breakthrough and innovation which is the core of a current major research collaborative on this topic and the subject of a paper to be presented by one of his JKMRC colleagues at Comminution '25 in April.

Our  deepest condolences to Frank's family and colleagues.

Christmas in Camborne

Camborne, just 13 miles north-west of Falmouth, is regarded as the most impoverished town in Cornwall and one of the poorest in UK. Yet in the mid-19th century it was one of the world's richest towns, the centre of Cornwall's flourishing tin and copper industries. The town and its near neighbour of Redruth were surrounded by hundreds of mines, Cornwall's deepest tin mine, Dolcoath, being situated in the town, as was South Crofty, the last tin mine to close, in 1998.

Echoes of the past on arrival at Camborne train station

On Christmas Eve 1801, the Puffing Devil, the world's first self-propelled steam-powered road locomotive, built by Camborne engineer Richard Trevithick, made its way up Camborne Hill (now Tehidy Road and Fore Street). At the top of the hill, in the town centre, the Camborne School of Mines was based from 1888 to 1975, and a couple of hundred yards away was the meeting place for mining engineers from around the world, the Tyacks Hotel.

Fittingly Tyacks was the venue for two Christmas mining events this month. Last Saturday was the annual CSM Association Christmas lunch, attended by mainly past students and staff of CSM.

Five days later the Christmas Cornish Mining Sundowner was held, as always, at Tyacks, with a good attendance of around 20 regulars.

It was particularly good to talk to Camborne School of Mines Director Pat Foster and Matthew Eyre, Associate Professor in Intelligent Mining. As is now well known Mining Engineering will be reintroduced as an undergraduate degree at CSM from September next year and the School wishes to celebrate this historic development with the establishment of a scholarship programme, which will help convert students onto this exciting learning pathway.

The aim is to establish a £2M endowment fund to support Mining Engineering students for many years to come. Students will either be offered a £15,000 scholarship upon enrolment to the Mining Engineering course for four years, or have the option to select Mining Engineering at the end of the common engineering first year, incentivised by the opportunity for the scholarship.  

The opportunity will be promoted to all students on the University of Exeter’s Engineering course from September 2025, with the first cohort notified of awards in Spring 2026. Each student will receive up to £60,000 over the course of their studies.

Donations are invited to help CSM launch this historic opportunity to Exeter students, in order to drive recruitment to this vitally important industry worldwide.

With Matthew Eyre and Pat Foster

The next Cornish Mining Sundowner will be at the County Arms Hotel, Truro from 5.30 pm on Thursday January 16th.

Flotation '25: Call for abstracts

"I would encourage all those young and not so young mineral processors with a passion for bubbles to put their fingers to the keyboard and write an abstract for Flotation 2025 in Cape Town. This conference is renowned for bringing academics and industry together to discuss the science of mineral froth flotation- an event not to be missed!" says Dr. Chris Greet, Global Mineral Processing Specialist at Magotteaux, Principal Consultant at Mineralis Consultants and Adjunct Associate Research Professor at University of South Australia.

There is now a call for abstracts for Flotation '25, MEI's 12th international flotation conference. Abstracts must be submitted via the website by May 31st 2025. All presenters will be invited to submit papers for peer-review after the conference. These will be refereed, and, if accepted, published immediately in the first available regular issue of Minerals Engineering, and included in the Virtual Special Issue of the conference on ScienceDirect. 

The technical programme will include oral and poster presentations, and three high profile keynote lectures, from Chris Greet, of Magotteaux, Australia, Charlotte Gibson, of Queen's University, Canada, and Jim Finch, Emeritus Professor at McGill University, Canada.

We are also pleased to announce that the conference dinner will be at the elegant Simon's Restaurant at the Groot Constantia Wine Estate.

Recent conference dinner at Simon's Restaurant, Groot Constantia

There are more photos and details on the posting of 29th April. Since that posting all 23 exhibition booths in the coffee and lunch area have been sold, but there are seven 2m x 1m booths available for rental outside the main conference room.

We look forward to seeing you next year at Cape Town's beautiful Vineyard Hotel.

See reports on Flotation '23

Some memories of Flotation '23

#Flotation25