In brief: Journal Impact Factors published; Congratulations to David Wiseman; Recent Comments

Journal Impact Factors Published

Journal impact factors for 2015 have recently been published (MEI Online), and I am pleased to see that Minerals Engineering still heads the table of leading mineral processing journals, with Elsevier's specialist journal Hydrometallurgy as usual in first place. On behalf of myself and Associate Editor Pablo Brito-Parada, many thanks to contributing authors, and of course, to our team of dedicated reviewers, for maintaining the journal's high standards.

Impact factor trends for mineral processing journals

Congratulations to David Wiseman

The AusIMM awards recognise contributions to the Institute and celebrate outstanding contributions to best practice professionalism in the minerals industry. The 2016 award winners have just been announced (MEI Online) and among them is an old friend of MEI, David Wiseman, who has attended, presented at, and sponsored many past MEI Conferences.

MEI's Amanda with David Wiseman at Physical Separation '13 in Falmouth  

David is recognised for the invention, development and commercialisation of an innovative software application for flowsheet development and drawing, mass balancing and process simulation called LIMN® ‘The Flowsheet Processor’. Development of LIMN began in1994 and it has since found application in 31 countries and more than 20 commodities/industries. More than 800 licenses have been sold. It has become the industry standard for modelling and simulation of coal preparation and diamond and iron ore upgrading plants in Australia and South Africa and increasingly in Europe and the Americas. It has also been applied in many other industries, including base metals minerals processing and hydrometallurgy.

Former JKMRC Director Prof. Alban Lynch spoke very highly of David in his MEI interview two years ago. By 1980 models of grinding and flotation circuits were well developed; many short courses were given on modelling, but simulation could not be used widely because engineers did not have easy access to bureau type computers. Personal computers were becoming available so a project was established to put the models on a PC. To demonstrate the validity of the modelling work and debug the programme the engineer who wrote the software spent 6 months with the PC at plants of AMIRA sponsors in USA and 6 months with sponsors in Australia. This was the origin of JKSimMet, which he feels was so successful because "a guy called Dave Wiseman wrote it. He had a lot of experience at Mount Isa, so he knew what was needed from a simulator". Knowing David well, I could understand Alban's praise for him, and his ability to keep things simple, a failing of many modern models, which have become so complex and difficult to understand that they are not easily accepted by operators.

Congratulations to David and all the other Award winners, from all at MEI.

Recent comments

There have been comments on the following postings since the last update:

Controversial “invisible gold” paper published

Challenges in processing nickel laterite ores

In brief (9th June)

Do today's engineering lecturers lack industrial experience?

Roberto Villas-Boas 1943-2016


Twitter @barrywills