Five days ago the minerals community lost another 20th century legend in the field of comminution, one year after the death of Prof. Alban Lynch.
Born in England his achievements include international reputation in the field of crushing and grinding for the power, mining and chemical industries. He was a recipient of the Gaudin Award from the SME in 1983 and the Nicholls Award of the Joint Engineering Society in 1987.
Prof. Austin is survived by his wife Sofia, his ex-wife Ann, and his three children, Mark, Timothy, and Stuart. He also leaves his grandchildren: Thomas, Charlotte, and Joseph.
Unfortunately, although I was aware of his reputation, I never met Prof. Austin, but I am sure that many of you did, and I invite you to share your memories of him below.
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I studied under Dr Austin at Penn State and helped as a grad student in crushing, screening, and weighing minerals for he and others. My fondest memory was when he asked that I retrieve samples of molybdenum ore from the drums stored in his barn (where his chickens often roosted …). We were picking feathers from the crushed ore for weeks!
ReplyDeleteIt would be good to know who you are
DeleteTom Wood, MS Mineral Processing, Penn State 1980
DeleteDr Austin was a great fan of breakage equations and grinding mills at Penn State. He was often found in the Mineral Processing lab scrutinizing our data from crushing, screening, and weighing quartz and mineral ores … knowing at a glance if the data reflected what the grinding index determined. He was short in stature but large in his knowledge and attention to the details. Grad students were pushed to work long hours … with great satisfaction. I know I learned a lot from him - it’s sad to see one of the last of the great mineral processing team (Austin, Aplan, Hogg, et al) of the 70’s and 80’s leave us. He will be missed!
DeleteFulcrum Industrial Construction, Denver, USA
Via Minerals Engineers
Another giant of the Minerals Industry. RIP. Your works will be forever and be used by future minerals generation.
ReplyDeleteAnthony (John) Pucjlowski, Consulting Metallurgist, South Africa
Via Minerals Engineers
I worked with Len Austin in the early 90’s when I was at Billiton Australia. My brief from Billiton was to investigate this new technology called “High Pressure Grinding Rolls” for the Boddington Gold Mine in Australia, which Billiton then part owned. I found that at the time, Len at Penn State was the only academic outside of the inventor, Prof Schonert at Clausthal, who believed they had applicability in the mining industry. Len was the first person to model HPGR’s for minerals. He gave me a draft copy of his work from 1990 that I still have today. Interestingly, it took another 20 years before Boddington finally installed HPGR’s. Len Austin is up there with the greats of mineral processing and especially comminution.
ReplyDeleteMike Battersby, Maelgwyn Mineral Services, Cardiff, UK
I was very saddened to hear about the passing of Professor Austin. Indeed, the comminution community lost one of its fathers. He was the champion of the application of the size-mass (population) balance model to media mills, with highlight to ball milling and HPGR. Personally, I will be eternally in his debt since he was the main encourager to pursue what later became the UFRJ mechanistic mill model. My wife and I had a great time with him and Sofia during their stay in Rio back in 2005, when we worked together, amongst visits to the botanical gardens and the sugarloaf. It was nice when he took the chance to explain my wife how passionate we are about research, although that took us away from more time with the family. Writing a paper with him was a learning experience too: he was very particular on how graphs looked like, and did not accept anything but perfection. He will be missed by anyone who had the chance to engage with him and his contributions will stand the test of time. Our sympathies to the family.
ReplyDeleteLuis Marcelo Tavares
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and GCC
Len's legacy lives on in so many models that use his mathematical methods and in the teaching and mentoring of a generation of researchers. My best memory being how enthusiastic he was about my experimental study of grinding media motion in a mill when he examined my PhD back in '92, noting how this understanding could dramatically move forward the modelling of comminution process - and soon enough along came DEM from Rajamani's group to trigger this pathway. A wonderful person, and a privilege to have had him in our research community and industry.
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