Minnesota is the largest producer of iron ore and taconite in the USA, and Minneapolis is the biggest city in the State, forming "Twin Cities" with the neighbouring state capital of St. Paul. Bisected by the Mississippi River, Minneapolis is known for its parks and lakes, and this year, for the first time it was the venue for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration (SME).
Everyone sets their own agenda for this huge congress and exhibition, but my focus is always the giant exhibition, a great place to stroll around, meet old friends and make new acquaintances. And there are always a few surprises, so this is my diary of my few days in Minneapolis.
Sunday February 25th
Yesterday's snowstorm caused many flight delays, and there were noticeably fewer delegates for the late afternoon reception in the exhibit area than in previous years.
I always seem to catch up with my old friend
Osvaldo Bascur, of OSIsoft, USA in the first few minutes of entering the hall, and he is always with interesting people, this time with
Jim Gebhart, of
FLSmidth,
Tarun Bhambhani, of
Solvay, USA and
Ronel Kappes, of
Newmont, USA.
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| Jim, Tarun, Ronel and Osvaldo |
At
last year's event I photographed Osvaldo with
Qingqing Huang, who was then a post-doctoral research assistant at West Virginia University. It was good to hear that, a year on, she is now an Assistant Professor at the University.
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| With Qingqing Huang |
The University of Utah's student body is well represented, and some of them are shown below, along with the Mining Engineering's Professor and Chair, Mike Nelson.
Before leaving the exhibition, I called in to see the UK's
International Mining team, this year without its stalwart,
John Chadwick, who I am sure will be back next year in Denver for the
International Mining Technology Hall of Fame Awards.
International Mining, one of the world's leading trade journals, is a media partner for all
MEI Conferences.
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| Phil Playle, Paul Moore and Kevin Lapham of International Mining |
Monday February 26th
As the exhibition hall did not open until 11am, I called in at the Bookstore, to talk to Jane Oliver and her team. There are no new mineral processing books to report this year, but a major volume is planned for launching at next year's meeting in Denver.
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| Theo Warrior, Ann Hoopingarner, Jane Oliver and Joe Mow |
The SME tells me that at this stage there have been 4707 registrations, and over 550 companies are exhibiting, so it looks like numbers are relatively low this year.
The South African branch of
Split Engineering was represented at
Comminution '16, and this morning
Tom Bobo, a founding director of the USA company, expressed his interest in April's
Comminution '18. Split have been using image analysis to provide on-line measure of particle size distribution of rocks from the ROM ore muck pile to the SAG mill feed, using a continuous, automatic, non-invasive monitoring system employing image processing technology for particle size, shape and colour for any conveyor belt or feeder location.
 |
Tom Bobo (left) and Jonathan Dufek (right) of Split with John Kemery of University of Arizona
and Rennie Kaunda of Colorado School of Mines |
Four years ago I wrote
an article for the blog singing the praises of two small companies who regularly exhibit at SME and at MEI's comminution conferences.
Chris Martin's Alabama-based
RSG Inc. has exhibited at the MEI events since 2006. Chris formed RSG in 1991, having identified a need for more efficient classification in the kaolin and marble industries, specifically for vertical roller mills, and in 1999 the company invented, designed and built the first ever mill for dry ultrafine grinding of calcium carbonate. The latest mill is a 450 kW ufg-mill, and in April Chris will be commissioning a major lime plant start-up in Thailand, and so will unfortunately have to miss out on
Comminution '18.
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| With Chris Martin |
The other small company highlighted in my 2014 article was Ontario-based
Starkey & Associates.
John Starkey founded S&A in 2000 and the company is now a global leader in ore hardness measurement, and grinding circuit design and optimisation, particularly for SAG mills. John and his wife
Donna have been familiar faces at SME for many years, and have sponsored MEI's comminution conferences since 2012. This year John and Donna have forsaken Minneapolis, as many people seem to have done, and have left the booth in the capable hands of their metallurgists,
Jenna Hedderson and
Spencer Reeves, two young people who give me every confidence that the future of the minerals industry is in safe hands.
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| With Jenna and Spencer |
There is an obvious scarcity of mineral processors this year, probably as there is no dedicated symposium in anyone's honour. So it was a great pleasure to see
Glenn Dobby, and his colleague
Catherine McInnes, of
Woodgrove Technologies, Canada. I have followed Glenn's career for around 30 years, ever since I invited him and
Jim Finch to Camborne School of Mines to present a workshop on column flotation, based on their eponymous text book on the subject. Glenn and his colleague
Glenn Kosick were the recipients of a double award, as Canadian mineral processors of the year, at the recent
CMP Annual Meeting in Ottawa. This was for their development of the
Staged Flotation Reactor, which will be highlighted by
Jan Nesset in his
keynote lecture at next year's
Flotation '19. Glenn and Catherine were talking to
Rob Dunne and
Chris Fleming. Rob is an adjunct professor at both Curtin University and the University of Queensland, Australia, and he will be presented a
keynote lecture at
Sustainable Minerals '18 in Namibia in June. Chris is Senior Metallurgical Consultant with
SGS, Canada and this year's recipient of one of the SME's top awards.
 |
| Rob, Catherine, Glenn and Chris |
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| Hans von Michaelis |
And it was to the Mineral Processing Division's Awards plenary session that I headed next.
Hans Von Michaelis unfortunately was delayed, but he was the Robert H. Richards Award winner for his commitment to advancing the mining and mineral processing industry by collecting and sharing information about new technologies and application through his Presidency of Randol International Ltd.
Chris Fleming won the Milton E. Wadsworth Award for "exemplifying Wadsworth’s finest qualities of energy and enthusiasm for his work and desire to share his knowledge".
Kevin Galvin is a long serving member of the
Minerals Engineering Editorial Board. He is Laureate Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and the winner of the MPD's most prestigious award, the
Antoine M. Gaudin Award, for his contribution to advances in the science and engineering of innovative systems for coal and mineral beneficiation. Kevin is the inventor of the well known
Reflux Classifier.
 |
| Chris Fleming and Kevin Galvin |
The relative lack of mineral processors at this year's event was evident from the low attendance at the awards lectures, the major MPD plenary, with only around 30 in the audience.
Many mineral processing companies are also missing from the exhibition this year, apart from in the comminution field, the area of mineral processing which has developed most rapidly in recent years. Stirred mills, for example, were little heard of in mining a few decades ago, but are now increasingly incorporated into flowsheets where ultrafine grinding is necessary.
Eirich's
TowerMill is one such machine, and
Mark Oles and
Christopher Clark, of
Eirich Machines, USA, were demonstrating a model of the mill to delegates from Colorado School of Mines. The Eirich Group is headquartered in Germany and has subsidiaries worldwide.
Nippon Eirich, the Japanese sister company, will be represented at
Comminution '18, and
Sam Palaniandy will be presenting work on developments for the further refinement of ultrafine grinding.
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| Mark Oles (right) with Colorado School of Mines delegates and Christopher Clark |
Rob McIvor, Chief Metallurgist with
Metcom Technologies Inc, was a keynote speaker at
Comminution '16, so it was good to catch up with him and Business Development Manager
Omar Arafat and Senior Metallurgist
Kyle Bartholomew, talking to
Bill Conger of
ME-Elecmetal.
Metcom Technologies has been generating a lot of interest with its new
Streamline™ ball mill circuit modelling program, and has also launched a new commercial service focused on optimization of ball mill media sizing practices. In the MPD Comminution technical session Rob presented a paper which analysed the relationship between the size of the grinding media in the mill and grinding performance.
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| Rob, Bill, Kyle and Omar |
Despite mineral processors being thin on the ground, the multi-speciality chemical company
Solvay had, as usual, a large team in attendance.
Solvay was a sponsor of
Flotation '17 and expect to have a big involvement in next year's
Flotation '19.
 |
| The large team from Solvay |
As does another major chemical company,
BASF, also strongly represented as a sponsor of
Flotation '17, and also with a big team here. BASF was presenting its extensive range of products for hydrometallurgy, mine backfill, solid liquid separation and tailings management in its exhibition booth. Additional focus is on the latest developments in iron ore binder technology and flotation, which are also presented in three of the technical sessions.
 |
| The BASF team |
Tuesday February 27th
The exhibition opened at 11 am this morning, but if my agenda had been to sit in mineral processing lectures before the opening I think my head would be spinning. There were eight parallel sessions of interest to mineral processors this morning, including comminution, flotation and plant design, so I opted for leisurely coffee before being allowed into the exhibit hall by the border guards.
It was nice of
Yuesheng Gao to make himself known to me. Yuesheng is a PhD student at Michigan Technical University. He left the Central South University in China at the end of 2016, after graduating with an MSc in
Prof. Yuehua Hu's group, supervised by
Dr. Zhiyong Gao, who looked after my brief
visit to Changsha last year.
Three of MEI's most valued sponsors are
Outotec,
Metso and
FLSmidth, who support a wide range of
MEI Conferences. They are giant multi-national companies, whose status in the industry is reflected by the size of their displays at every SME.
It is always good to catch up with
Guven Onal, of Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, a regular at
SME meetings and
IMPCs. Guven was Chairman of the
2006 IMPC in Istanbul.
It was also good to see the
2016 MEI Young Person's Award winner,
Swadhin Saurabh, with his colleagues in the
Millcreek Engineering booth.
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| With Swadhin Saurabh (2nd left) and colleagues |
On leaving the exhibition I saw the University of Arizona's
Brent Hiskey chatting with members of the
Chevron Phillips flotation chemical company.
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| Brent Hiskey (2nd right) at the Chevron Phillips booth |
It has been a somewhat downbeat day, with many of the familiar races missing, the general consensus being that Minneapolis was not the best choice of venue. However, let's see what tomorrow morning holds.
Wednesday February 28th
I called in for a final stroll around the exhibits this morning before leaving for the airport and my
long journey back to Cornwall, where there is very rare snow!
The final day of the exhibition is usually quiet, but today it was like a ghost town, but I did manage to call at two more booths.
I spoke to
Pete Hoffmann and
Ron Hutchcraft of
Fluid Systems, who are interested in an involvement in
Physical Separation '19 in Cape Town next year. The company manufactures cyclones and screens for high volume ultrafine operations.
Bruker is a sponsor of
Process Mineralogy '18, and I had a long chat with
Tina Hill and
Patrick Woo, Applications Scientists with
Bruker AXS, USA, and
Hitachi High-Tech, Canada, respectively.
Bruker and
Hitachi are in partnership for automated mineralogy software for minerals, oil and gas.
This has been a fairly low-key SME event, for me at least. Many people seem to have forsaken Minneapolis for various reasons, Denver, Salt Lake City and Phoenix being the most popular venues. The mining industry is now waking from its long slumber, so we can expect a record turnout next year in Denver, the home of the SME. I look forward to it, and I thank the organising committee for another smooth running event.
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