Day 3 at Comminution '16

Early morning view of Table Mountain from the conference centre

The penultimate day began with another fine keynote, from Malcolm Powell of the JKMRC.

ZEISS is displaying its SmartZoom 5 microscope which is ideally suited to measure wear processes on grinding media and bearings used during rock breakage thanks to its ability to build up a 3D model of a sample and quantify surface roughness. Ben Tordoff also presented a seminar to around 20 delegates during the lunch break, looking at applications of X-Ray microscopy in the mining industry.

Cathy He of King's Ceramics, with Randall Crisp and Ben Tordoff of Zeiss

We last saw Bernhard Kloos of German company Doering, 10 years ago at Ultrafine Grinding '06 in Falmouth. The family owned Doering foundry is the leading manufacturer of cylindrical cast grinding media "CYLPEBS", made from a low alloy chilled cast iron and is exhibiting for the first time at an MEI conference. CYLPEBS are slightly tapered cylindrical grinding bodies with equal length and diameter, the shape having been developed to maximize available grinding due to bulk density and surface area advantages and their internal structure providing wear resistance and shape retention.

Amanda with Bernhard

Like Doering, Polycorp Ltd, a privately owned Canadian Company is exhibiting for the first time. Polycorp specialises in the design and manufacture of engineered elastomeric parts, such as grinding mill liners. Their products use polymer based materials, primarily rubber, for abrasion, impact, contamination and/or chemical protection.

                       With Bob Stevens and Tabash Bhattacharjee of Polycorp

At the end of the day's sessions we met in the gardens for the "Happy Hour" where I managed to photograph representatives from five of the six institutes comprising the Global Comminution Collaboration, which identifies comminution research needs and unifies the approach to working on these needs. The only missing institute was the University of Rio de Janeiro, the other five institutes being Australia's JKMRC, Sweden's Chalmers University, the University of Cape Town, Germany's Technische Universitat Braunschweig, and Turkey's Haceteppe University.

Members of the Global Comminution Collaboration

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