In conversation with T.C. Rao- "the father of Indian mineral processing"

With T.C. Rao in New Delhi, 2012

It was great to catch up with my old friend Prof. T.C. Rao at the IMPC in New Delhi in 2012. He presented a keynote lecture, and in introducing him, the chairman described him as "the father of Indian mineral processing", which few people will dispute. He has published around 225 research papers in International and National journals and his pioneering works on modelling of unit operations in coal and mineral processing are still being extensively used by academic institutions and industries all over the world for process simulation and optimisation. He is the recipient of many awards/citations from various professional bodies and is a Fellow of many prestigious societies. In its early days he was Regional Editor of Minerals Engineering and he is, or has been, a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Mineral Processing, the International Journal of Coal Preparation, the Transactions of the Mining, Geological & Metallurgical Institute of India and of the Indian Institute of Metals. He is a Council Member of the Indian Institute of Metals and the Mining, Geological and Metallurgical Institute of India. He was a past President and presently a Patron Member of the Indian Institute of Mineral Engineering and was honoured as a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineers in Coal and Mineral Processing Specialization.

The IMPC was our first meeting in 21 years, since his attendance at Reagents '91 in Cornwall. It was good, therefore, to phone him at his home in Hyderabad and talk to him about his early formative years in Australia, and his views on modern mineral processing.

TC in Cornwall, 1991, with Dr. M. Prasad, Prof. Shouci Lu and Prof. T. Wakamatsu

Tadimety Chakrapani (TC) Rao was born in September, 1940, and he received a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Geology from Andhra University, Waltair, India in 1959, and an M.Sc. in Ore Dressing from the same university in 1960.

He then felt that Australia was the place to be to progress his career, and was offered a research post at the University of Queensland (UQ), supervised by the late Prof. F.T.M. White, Head of Mining at UQ, who also recruited Alban Lynch to the department to start up an experimental mine and mineral processing at the University. Later with a donation from Mount Isa Mines, this became the Julius Krutschnitt Mineral Research Centre (JKMRC), with Alban as its first Director. When Prof. White left UQ for Canada, TC was supervised by Prof. Lynch; TC helped with the teaching of mineral processing in the fledgling department, together with the late Rex Bull, who was senior lecturer at that time. In those early days he was inspired by Antoine Gaudin's 1939 Textbook of Mineral Dressing, and A.F. Taggart's 1945 Handbook of Mineral Dressing, as they "explained the theory of mineral processing in a simple way".

He obtained his Ph.D degree, under the guidance of Prof. Alban Lynch in 1965, working on the characteristics of hydrocyclones. He obviously regards Alban Lynch with great affection and respect, describing him as "an exceptional man, who treated me like a family member, and helped me develop my latent talents". They published their work on hydrocyclones in a number of seminal papers, and the models are still valid today, being used in many hydrocyclone manufacturers' performance curves. He attributes their ongoing validity to their simplicity, involving parameters which can be easily measured, such as vortex finder diameter, spigot diameter, and can therefore be confidently accepted by operators. He feels that this is the failing of many modern modelling techniques, which, due to their complexity, often inhibit their use industrially. He made a point that particles in a closed grinding circuit are moving in a fluid medium, but many of the models are based on screening size analysis, so there is a need for methods of characterise particles according to hydraulic size, putting particles into 'behavioural' ranges, as is done with 'sub-sieve' particles in devices such as the Warman Cyclosizer.

TC stayed in Australia for eight years, working for a time at Broken Hill mine, before finally returning to India to take up a position as a Faculty member of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur for a further eight years, before accepting the position of Professor and Head of Mineral Engineering at the Indian School of Mines (ISM), Dhanbad in 1977. He established a new four-year graduate programme (B.Tech) in Mineral Engineering, the only of its kind in India and was also Dean of Academic & Research at ISM. He invited many visiting lecturers from overseas to interact with staff and students and teach courses. I was one of them and it was in Dhanbad in 1989 where I first met TC.

Dhanbad 1989, with TC (centre) and P.R. Sinha

At the IMPC in New Delhi it was reported that only 2% of the world's minerals engineering graduates came from India, compared with 50% from China. TC feels that youngsters are not coming into minerals engineering "because we are not exciting them" and that academics, who seem to spend most of their time striving to publish papers, should have some industrial experience, to pass on the importance of "seeing the whole picture" to their students. Minerals engineers are” custodians of a finite natural resource” and each corporate office should put a certain amount of money aside as part of their budget for teachers to spend 2-3 months with their students on a mine site". I agreed, mentioning that in the 1970s this did happen, and in 1978 I spent 6 weeks in South Africa supervising student vacation projects, and learned a lot in doing so which I could pass on to future students (see also the posting of 30 August 2010).

In 1989, Prof. Rao took over as Director of the Regional Research Laboratory, Bhopal (now Advanced Materials and Processes Research Institute AMPRI), the only CSIR laboratory in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Though the laboratory was on the verge of closure at that stage, it emerged as one of the best performing CSIR laboratories under his Leadership and achieved many laurels for its outstanding contributions.

He formally retired in 2000, but is still actively involved with many industries and R&D Organisations as an advisor. It was really good to talk to him, and I hope to catch up with him again in the not too distant future- maybe at this year's IMPC in Chile?

More Conversations