It was good to hear from Peter Amelunxen last month. Peter was the first recipient of the MEI Young Person's Award in 2011, when he was then with Aminpro in Chile. He and his family moved to Toronto a couple of weeks ago and should be coming out of their mandatory 14 days quarantine about now.
 |
| Peter with 2018 MEI Award winner Zhiyong Gao at Flotation '19 |
Peter is now Vice-President of Technical Services for Flotation '21 sponsor Hudbay, a diversified mining company primarily producing copper concentrate (containing copper, gold and silver) and zinc metal. Directly and through its subsidiaries, Hudbay owns three polymetallic mines, three operating ore concentrators and a zinc production facility in northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada and Cusco, Peru, and copper projects in Arizona and Nevada, USA.
In 2015 Hudbay purchased the Snow Lake Project, which included the New Britannia gold concentrator. They are now in the process of building a copper flotation circuit to treat the copper-gold ores from the Lalor deposit, and they have chosen to create a flotation circuit made entirely of Jameson Cells. The northern Manitoba operation needs to process finer grinds and higher grades of ore, and to manage costs while doing so means pursuing as small a footprint as possible, while still delivering optimised recoveries and concentrate grades.
 |
| Jameson Cells |
Peter tells me that the idea for all Jameson cells came about before the Flotation '19 conference. He had been working with Contact cells for a long time at Aminpro and had always recognized their potential for those applications that had a high degree of liberated hydrophobic mineral, combined with a high susceptibility to entrainment, such as copper/moly separation or polymetallic circuits. New Britannia is neither of those, but it still works because the flotation feed particle size is driven by gold liberation for the gold leach circuit, so the copper is fully liberated and very fast floating, but also highly susceptible to entrainment (because of the fine grind).
Hudbay had recently recruited an Australian engineer, Matthew Taylor, who had experience with Jameson Cells, flotation modelling, and piloting, and he drove the concept forward in collaboration with Virginia Lawson and her team from Glencore Technology, who sent them a pilot unit and provided technical support. The pilot unit was tested last summer at the nearby Stall concentrator, which also processes ore from the Lalor Mine to produce zinc and copper concentrates.
Flotation '19 gave them an opportunity to discuss results, share ideas, and build relationships with Virginia and Graeme Jameson and "even the guys from other flotation companies, who also provide very good technology that I would consider for other applications that may be less appropriate to pneumatic cells. That’s the value of the flotation conferences and why we sponsor the events!".
 |
| Grame Jameson and Virginia Lawson cut the 30th Anniversary Jameson Cell cake at Flotation '19 |
Peter concluded by saying that through Matt’s work, combined with excellent support and collaboration from the Stall operations team, the New Britannia project team, and the Aecom engineering team, Hudbay identified significant reductions in flotation capital and operating costs by eliminating conventional tank cells and reducing the circuit complexity, while also identifying some exciting performance improvement opportunities at the Stall concentrator through retrofitting Jameson cells in the existing copper and zinc circuits.
Good to note that one of MEI Awardees is doing so well(including health) in the industry. Congratulations Peter.
ReplyDeleteJameson's contribution stands out with these installations.
The ore seems to be a complex one and I am naturally curious to know where these associated value are getting recovered--are you producing a bulk concentrate with all values and then they get recovered in metallurgical process? Peter, you need not give these details if they are confidential for your Organisation.
In these times(hope we are getting at the end of tunnel and would soon see some light) reading these technical details definitely boost our morale--keep at it Barry .
Hi Prof. Rao, Thanks for the comment, glad you are staying healthy!
ReplyDeleteThe Lalor ores are quite variable from lens to lens, but those ores that we will treat at New Britannia are primarily chalcopyrite/pyrite with some minor zinc and lead. The flotaiton circuit will produce copper concentrate containing some 40% to 60% of the gold, and the flotation tails goes to a leach circuit to recover the rest of the gold. Overall gold recovery will be above 90% for both flotation and leach. The key aspect of this circuit is that the grind size is driven by the gold mineralization-- it needs to be fine enough to achieve economical leach recoveries. The chalcopyrite grain size is relatively coarse, so at the design P80 it is almost fully liberated and has very fast collection kinetics. This circuit takes advantage of those characteristics.
Cheers!
Peter, so nice of you to reply.
ReplyDeleteI am confined to home and praying for the humankind to come out of this crisis at the earliest--as all are doing.
I am extremely happy that you gave so much detail on ore characteristics and how you analysed and then changing the circuit--message to youngsters is "do not blame the ore"--get a good pathology report on the ore and select your design and OPERATING variables--you put it in technical terms and Lynch &Rao in me summarised it.
In one of the Blogs of MEI (sorry Barry, I can not trace it) it was discussed "why people do not speak out)-- particularly practicing engineers to give their success stories.
Well done,Peter.
Great invention, Barry.
ReplyDeleteI remember doing the first Jameson trials at Phoscor in South Africa when I was working for Mineral Deposits. Even those early designs were so easy to use, and their effectiveness was noteworthy.
Prof Graeme is an amazing man.
John V., Australia