Grinding Solutions hosts the first of the winter Cornish Mining Sundowners

Last night's Cornish Mining Sundowner was kindly hosted by Comminution '20 sponsor Grinding Solutions Ltd (GSL), in their extensive laboratory and pilot facilities at Tresillian near Truro. It is exactly two years since GSL hosted a sundowner, and since then the company has expanded considerably, in terms of personnel, facilities and services offered. Originally offering comminution capabilities, GSL now has a range of pilot scale set-ups, ranging from gravity to leaching, and they have recently completed a number of early stage metallurgical studies to support the exploration and evaluation of deposits in Portugal and Ireland.

GSL's Nick Wilshaw welcomes sundowner guests

Since our last sundowner at Tresillian, the comminution testing facilities have been extended to include a Versatile Comminution Rig (VCR), designed to conduct Bond ball and rod mill work index tests as well as continuous milling whilst monitoring the energy input. Also on display was a HIGmill™ from Swiss Tower Mills. With the VCR, GSL can now offer grinding test work from AG/SAG design through Bond ball and rod work index and then further down in size with the Jar mill and SMD, ISA and HIGmill™.

GSL's expanded gravity separation equipment gives them full capability from spirals and tables down to fine separation via Multi-Gravity Separator (MGS) and Falcon enhanced gravity separators. They have also broadened their horizons into flotation, with a pilot scale flotation bank and a Maelgwyn Imhoflot™ Pneumatic Flotation Cell. Maelgwyn Mineral Services, also a Comminution '20 sponsor, as well as sponsoring Flotation '19, have also supplied an Aachen Reactor™ which achieves efficient high level oxygen mass transfer in slurries, particularly useful in refractory gold processing.

So it was a very special night for GSL, with a record number of sundowner attendees (around 100) being guided around the facilities by the Managing Director, birthday boy Nick Wilshaw, and his wife Felicity and their young team of metallurgists. And it was great to catch up with a number of new faces among the regulars.

It was particularly good to see Neville Plint, all the way from Brisbane. Prof. Plint is the Director of the University of Queensland's Sustainable Minerals Institute, who will have an input to next year's Sustainable Minerals '20 conference in Falmouth.

Nick Wilshaw and Neville Plint

Also good to see Dave Dew again. Dave will be a keynote lecturer at Biomining '20 next June. In the photo below he is with Paul Norris, a keynote lecturer at Biohydrometallurgy '12, and Eugene Els and Toby Frostwick, of AFX Mixing and Pumping Technologies, UK. The company manufactures a range of top entry agitators from 0.18kW to 750kW, for use in processing, manufacturing, storage and treatment throughout a wide range of industries, and they hope to have an involvement with Biomining '20.

Dave, Toby, Eugene and Paul

The MSc courses at Camborne School of Mines started this month, and I was pleased to see 5 of the 10 mineral processing course students at their first sundowner. 

With mineral processing students Toby French, Jonny Coad, Ahmet Yamantas, Erdogan Savas and (seated) Tom Rigby.
Ahmet and Erdogan graduated from Hacettepe University, Turkey

It was also great to see Nick Wilshaw present two MSc mining students, Laura Carter-Greaves, from UK, and Sarah Mojuetan, from Nigeria, with their scholarship cheques, awarded by Women in Mining and the CSM Trust.

Nick with Sarah and Laura

All in all, a wonderful evening at Tresillian, and a big thanks to all at GSL for their hospitality.

The next sundowner will be on Thursday November 21st, from 5.30 pm at the Portreath Arms Hotel.

@barrywills