Comminution '18: Day 3

The most intensive day of the conference today, starting with a keynote lecture from Aubrey Mainza at 8am, and finishing, after 20 presentations, at 5.20pm.

The long coffee and lunch breaks gave us time to chat in the exhibition area, and meet some interesting people.

Chris Rule is well known throughout the industry, and was with Anglo American Platinum for many years. He left in late 2015 and is now an independent consultant, involved with many companies and projects. This week he is representing one of his clients, Cenotec, a South Korean company. Cenotec was founded in 1999, and manufactures grinding media beads (Cenobeads™) with a range of specific gravities. The company currently supplies mining companies in Africa, Australia, South and North America. He is seen below with Giusy Baio of Industri Bitossi, Italy.

JSC Altynalmas is one of the most famous gold producers in the Republic of Kazakhstan, and has been represented at a couple of MEI's Process Mineralogy conferences. So it was good to welcome Joel Geronimo, the first of the company's representatives at a Comminution Conference. Joel is from the Philippines, and below he is talking to Tapash Bhattacharjee of Polycorp, South Africa, a manufacturer of rubber liners, which have been in existence for more than forty years and are now often preferred over traditional steel, largely because they weigh less and are easier to maintain. The results of the successful installation of Polycorp’s PolyBlok™ liner technology at Hudbay - Constancia’s  ball mills in its operations in Peru and the resulting benefits in reduced power draw, increased mill throughput and ease of handling was the subject of one of the poster presentations.

There are 7 presentations from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, this week, two of which are posters, and in the poster area I caught up with all seven representatives of the university.

Meanwhile Jon was talking to Tony Anyimadu, Principal Global Metallurgist with AngloGoldAshanti, South Africa, and Sampson Arthur and Bob Ntsiakoh, Unit Manager and Plant Supervisor respectively at Abosso Goldfields, Ghana.

Jon, Tony, Sampson and Bob

Amanda was in the Outotec booth talking to Jimmy Loucas and Angie Voges. Amanda and Angie are looking forward to meeting up in Zambia in July for the SAIMM Cu-Co conference, at which Outotec is a premium sponsor, and MEI a media sponsor.

We were back in the exhibition area at the end of the sessions, for the second of our Vineyard sundowners, fortuitously indoors, as the welcome rains arrived today!

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