New Faces at the Cornish Mining Sundowner

Barbara and I arrived back from Namibia on Wednesday afternoon, in time for last night's Cornish Mining Sundowner in Falmouth, our 6th sundowner of the month!

And on a lovely sunny evening it was great to see an eclectic bunch of people at the Chain Locker pub, with mineral processing and extractive metallurgy being unusually well represented. Two well-known biohydrometallurgists were unable to make it to Namibia. Paul Norris, of University of Exeter, and Dave Dew of Dewality Consultants, are looking forward to the conference coming back to Falmouth, as Biomining '20, and Dave has agreed in principle to present a keynote lecture at the meeting.

Dean Eastbury has been a familiar face at MEI Conferences over the past 10 years, in his role as Executive Publishing Manager for Elsevier, and being in charge of Minerals Engineering journal. Dean is now retired and moved from Oxford only last week to take residence with his partner Sharlene in the town of Hayle, on Cornwall's north coast. I look forward to some hard north coast hikes with Dean and hope that he will become a sundowner regular.

Tony Batchelor (GeoScience Ltd), Barbara, Dave, Paul, Dean, and Dave Goldburn (Holman-Wilfley Ltd)

It was particularly good to welcome three representatives from King's Ceramics and Chemicals, China. Alex Wang is MEI's latest 'Rising Star' and he was accompanied by two of his colleagues, Jiaye Luo and Ray Xu. They have travelled from Beijing to visit Grinding Solutions Ltd for two days of meetings. King’s and Grinding Solutions are early sponsors of Comminution '20, and have worked together for a number of years via their involvement with the comminution series of conferences. The focus of the visit for King’s was to continue to learn and develop their knowledge of the application of their ceramic media in ultrafine grinding. Ray and Alex work in King’s ultra fine grinding division and Jiaye, from King’s R&D department, is learning more about the processing side to help inform future product development. This was Jiaye's first time outside of China, so what better place to enjoy a pint of British beer than Falmouth's historic Chain Locker!

BW with Jiaye, Ray and Alex of King's, and Felicity and Nick Wilshaw and James Strong of Grinding Solutions

Twitter @barrywills