Process Mineralogy '22: a return to face-to-face meetings for MEI Conferences

It was really good to be in Sitges, Spain, last week for Process Mineralogy '22, MEI's first face-to-face event since Flotation '19 three years ago, and four years since Process Mineralogy '18 in Cape Town.

The conference, the 6th in the series, was sponsored by Bruker, Zeiss, Promet101, Tescan, Petrolab, and Capstone Copper, with media partners International Mining and Minerals Engineering, and in consultation with Assoc. Prof. Megan Becker, of the University of Cape Town.

All previous process mineralogy conferences have been held in Cape Town, but with uncertainties on Covid restrictions during the early stages of organisation we opted for a brand new venue, and the Meliá Sitges Hotel on the Mediterranean coast near Barcelona did not disappoint.

The view of Sitges from the Meliá Hotel

The conference began on November 2nd, but on the previous afternoon a workshop on the future of 3D characterisation was provided by the partners of the EIT Raw Materials funded project 2D3Dscopy, which was followed by a welcoming reception.

A welcome to our four delegates from Codelco, Chile

The following is a brief summary of the daily events.

Wednesday November 2nd

MEI's Jon Wills opened the conference this morning, welcoming the 70 delegates from 20 countries. He then handed over to me to present two MEI Young Person's Awards, the 2020 award to Ahmad Hassanzadeh and the 2021 Award to Paulina Quintanilla. 

Paulina, of Imperial College, UK, then co-chaired the first technical session with Matt Hiscock, of Oxford Instruments NanoAnalysis, UK. 

This session opened with a keynote lecture "Process mineralogy of unconventional mineral deposits - examples of applications and challenges" by Kurt Aasly, Assoc. Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Dr. Aasly identified "unconventional mineral deposits” as non-metallic industrial mineral deposits, construction materials, and various types of deep-sea mineral deposits.

Only three papers followed the keynote in the morning session, to allow a long coffee break in the exhibition area, where delegates had the first chance to talk informally.

MEI Award winner Ahmad Hassanzadeh was one of the morning speakers, presenting a paper on complementary approaches in characterization of secondary raw materials. Ahmad is a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science & Technology, as well as being a Chief Research Officer with Maelgwyn Minerals Services Ltd in UK. 

From the Chair, Paulina introduced her PhD supervisor from Imperial College, Pablo Brito-Parada who discussed a methodology for coupling the metallurgical performance of stibnite ores in the comminution-flotation process with real time quantifications of surface exposure by combining SEM/EDX measurements (2D high-level characterization technique) with 3D time resolved XMT measurement.

Alan Butcher was a keynote speaker at Process Mineralogy '18. I have known him as a friend for many years, since he was a geology lecturer at Camborne School of Mines in the early 1990s. He then moved on to Australia and CSIRO, where he was heavily involved with QEM-SEM. During his time as Chief Scientific Officer with Intellection he was involved in the organisation of MEI's Automated Mineralogy conferences in Brisbane. After the demise of Intellection he was with FEI for a few years, and he is now Professor of Geomaterials and Applied Mineralogy at the Geological Survey of Finland, researching battery minerals, within the context of a circular economy and the transition to a sustainable and carbon-neutral world. He presented a paper in this morning's session, co-authored by no less than 14 authors from Finland and the UK on new observations on the enigmatic commercial mineral spodumene and applications for processing and traceability in the battery mineral ecosystem.

Alan Butcher with me, and Luis Cisternas (Chile) and Yesica Botero (Canada) 

Minerals Engineering journal is now a media partner for MEI Conferences, with new Editor-in-Chief Pablo Brito-Parada looking after MEI Conferences special issues, including that from this conference. The journal was well represented at the conference and in the photo below I, as founding editor, am with Pablo, editor Kristian Waters, of McGill University, Canada and editorial board member Norman Lotter, of Flowhseets Metallurgical Consulting Inc., Canada.

Kristian, Pablo, Norman and me

Kristian chaired the afternoon session, which began with a presentation by  Camilo Mena Silva, one of five delegates from the Norwegian University of Science & Technology, on early-stage application of process mineralogy methodologies for mineral tracking in flotation of rare earth elements-bearing minerals from a deposit in Norway.

Camilo Silva, Ezgi Akyildiz, Ahmad Hassanzadeh, Pshem Kowalczuk, Kurt Aasly of NTU

Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, is also well represented with four delegates, and in their first presentation PhD student Glacialle Tiu discussed the quantification of the variability of a complex ore using geometallurgical domains.  Glacialle is photographed below with one of her co-authors. Yousef Ghorbani, and Luleå colleagues Carolina Manbro and Mehdi Parian.

Carolina, Mehdi, Yousef and Glacialle of Luleå University of Technology

Kate Tungpalan represented the University of Queensland’s JKMRC as a post-graduate student at Process Mineralogy '14 and at Process Mineralogy '17 she presented a paper on behalf of the University of the Philippines and was also awarded a prize for one of the best presentations. So impressed were we with her that we identified her as a Rising Star in her field. Kate is now an Associate Professor at the University of the Philippines researching geometallurgy and ore texture characterisation and this afternoon presented a paper describing a geometallurgical characterisation approach for predicting process performance.

Kate, 2nd left, with Glacialle Tui, also of The Philippines,
and Mariola Zajac and Corinne Garner, of Petrolab, UK

Benjamin De Castro is a Phd student at UQAT, Canada and is a geologist by training, having studied at the Universities of Paris Saclay and Grenobles Alpes developing an interest in mining geology at BRGM in France. Benjamin presenting a paper on his PhD topic, investigating the effect of various polished section preparation protocols on the automated optical microscopy analyses to determine the mineral abundance including transparent phases.

Benjamin (right) with Rachid Hakkou (Morocco) and Laura Pérez-Barnuevo (Spain)

Glen Nwaila, from Wits University, South Africa, was unable to obtain a visa, so his paper was presented by Yousef Ghorbani, one of his co-authors. This final paper of the day on unlocking the value of low-grade ores in the Witwaterrand goldfields, explored the effectiveness of cyanide, thiosulphate, and glycine for gold recovery.

An interesting first day ended with a late afternoon sundowner in the hotel gardens, a great opportunity to bond with old and new faces.

Thursday November 3rd

The morning session was chaired by Przemyslaw Kowalczuk of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Norman Lotter of Flowsheets Metallurgical Consulting Inc., Canada. The first four presentations dealt with geometallurgy, the practice of combining geology or geostatistics with mineral processing, which is still an evolving field, finding wide application by mining companies. 

Teaching the elements of geometallurgy to students coud be made easier, according to Yousef Ghorbani, LKAB Professor in Geometallurgy at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, by applying game elements into education, making learning more spontaneous and pleasurable, particularly with abstract or difficult concepts, and he described a study aimed at developing a serious game to improve student learning in the area of Geometallurgy.

Mehdi Parian, an Associate Professor at Luleå University of Technology, showed that much of the sustainability and energy efficiency dimensions of geometallurgical programs are driven by mineralogy rather than chemical assays and he discussed the use of micro-XRF mapping for analysis of mineral grades and texture.

Rocio Vargas Soto has much experience of geology and geochemistry in her native Chile, and in Peru. She is now a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland's Sustainable Minerals Institute and presented her research work aimed at identifying and quantifying key mineralogical and geochemical features of orebodies, which can be useful in mineral processing and mine planning.

Rocio (right) with Úrsula Grunwald (Spain)

Taking us to the morning coffee break, Tomas Hrstka, the Global Technical Manager Mineralogy at SGS, Canada, presented applications of automated mineralogy using the Tescan Integrated Mineral Analyser for critical minerals in beneficiation and geometallurgy.

Tomas Hrstka with Megan Becker

Arturo Bravo is another geologist from Chile at the conference, now studying the mineralogy of anisotropic rocks at Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany, the topic of his presentation after the coffee break. This was followed by another presentation from keynote speaker Kurt Aasly, who described collaborative work between the Norwegian University of Science & Technology, and Metso Outotec on the application of rebound hardness testing in drill core logging.

The final three presentations of the morning related to comminution. Javier Merrill Cifuentes, a PhD student at the University of Tasmania, showed how an increase in the accuracy and precision of rock hardness predictive modelling can be achieved through the incorporation of automated textural clustering based on the Mineral Co-occurrence Probability Fields (MCOPF) method.

Thomas Riegler, Senior Scientist at Eramet Ideas, France, an economic geologist with nearly 15 years experience in Australia, Canada, China, France, Ireland and Sweden, then showed how automated mineralogy can be applied to the evaluation of a dry comminution route for SiMn slags.

Thomas Riegler with Matt Hiscock (UK)

And before the lunch break Arturo Bravo was back on stage showing why, in order to obtain selective comminution, the characteristics of the mineral phases present must be determined accurately. 

Arturo (right) with Camila Guimarães da Silva Tochtrop
and Shuvam Gupta (Germany)

MEI Award winner Ahmad Hassanzadeh chaired the afternoon session, with four papers relating to froth flotation and magnetic separation. Scott Brindle, a senior geoscientist at Glencore's XPS Expert Process Solutions in Canada, described how a multi-faceted mineralogical program was undertaken on three ore types from the Sudbury Basin. The application of process mineralogy indicated that, although the ores show favorable liberation of Ni and Cu sulphides and metal entitlement, challenges to mineral processing remain pertaining to gangue mineralogy, including a high ratio of pyrrhotite to pentlandite (10:1) and an elevated content of orthopyroxene known to adversely affect froth stability during flotation.

Scott and his wife with Marek Dosbaba (Czech Republic),
Marijn Boone (Belgium) and Antonio Matsinhe (Mozambique)

Lebogang Babedi is a PhD candidate at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, whose primary research goal is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the changes in molecular-level mineral chemistry of various sulphide minerals caused by the presence of various trace elements, and to link those changes to beneficiation responses. He showed how pyrite mineral chemistry variation affects the electrochemical response to flotation collectors.

Lebogang (centre) with Antonio Matsinhe (Mozambique) and
Juan Sebastian Guiral Vega (Canada) 

Camila Guimarães da Silva Tochtrop graduated in mining engineering in Brazil and is currently a masters student at Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology, Germany. She showed how applying particle-based separation modelling on 3D particle data can better quantify the influence of particle size and shape in flotation.

In the final paper of the day Juan Sebastian Guiral Vega, who is a Colombian, discussed his PhD work at Université Laval and COREM, Canada on particle-based characterization and process modeling to comprehend the behavior of iron ores in drum-type wet low-intensity magnetic separation.

Following the final presentation, there was an added bonus, a one-hour workshop, "3D Automated Mineralogy Here and Now", presented by Eddy Hill, Manager, Business Sector, Natural Resources at ZEISS Research Microscopy Solutions, UK. Automated Quantitative-Computed Tomography is a valuable analytical tool that promises to bring the reality of 3D measurements to our interpretation of a sample. In the workshop, conference sponsor Zeiss shared how the challenges are being overcome to develop the first system capable of Automated Quantitative-CT Mineralogy.

Alistair McBride and Eddy Hill, of Zeiss, with Kristian Waters and
Ozan Kökkılıç of McGill University, Canada

After such an intensive day it was good to relax and socialise at the conference dinner, a themed "food market" where we could sample the delicious food at various stalls and enjoy the Spanish wines which flowed freely.

Friday November 4th

The morning session, chaired by Yousef Ghorbani, of Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, and Pablo Brito-Parada, of Imperial College, UK, began with a keynote lecture from conference consultant Megan Becker, of the University of Cape Town. In 2018, Megan was nominated as one of the top 100 Global Inspirational Women in Mining, having numerous academic and industrial collaborations on projects in geometallurgy, process mineralogy, flotation and comminution, hydrometallurgy, and environmental mineralogy. This morning she spoke about the contribution of mineralogy to sustainability in the mine life cycle.

Megan with Norman Lotter (Canada)

Rachid Hakkou, of the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Morocco showed how ore sorting of coarse materials has great potential to improve processing operations. He described work seeking to evaluate the phosphate recovery in phosphate mine waste rock piles using the Dual energy X-rays transmission technique.

Yesica Botero is currently a Ph.D. Student in Mineral Process Engineering at the University of Antofagasta, Chile and University of Quebec in Abitibi Temiscamingue, Canada. She presented work on the application of characterisation techniques for the prevention of acid mine drainage for waste rock from a Chilean porphyry copper mine.

Yesica with Luis Cisternas (Chile) and MEI's Amanda and Jon Wills

Conference sponsor Petrolab is a Cornish company that has been operating for 25 years analysing the content of rocks, minerals, ores, aggregates and concrete from all over the world. Two of the company's mineralogists presented papers this morning. Mariola Zajac showed the importance of knowing when to use and combine techniques including optical petrography, XRD and automated mineralogy. Mariola's colleague Corinne Garner discussed the importance of sample preparation techniques for use in automated mineralogy.

Bruker Nano FmbH, of Germany is one of the conference sponsors and after the coffee break Senior Application Scientist Andrew Menzies showed how high-speed Micro-XRF analysis of drill cores and rock samples can be used for predictive mineral processing.

Bruker's Jonathan Knapp, Andrew Menzies and Joerg Blieffert with Kurt Aasly (Norway)

The importance of 3D particle characterisation has been highlighted in recent days by the two workshops on this subject and the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology in Germany was one of the organisers of Tuesday's workshop. Two papers from the Institute took this theme further, Jose Godinho asking can we do 3D characterisation and are we ready for it, and Shuvan Gupta described a standardized workflow to measure mineralogical composition, liberation and 3D geometry of particles using micro x-ray computed tomography. 

The final session of the conference was chaired by our keynote speakers Megan Becker and Kurt Aasly and began with a presentation from Matt Hiscock, head of product science at Oxford Instruments NanoAnalysis, UK, who discussed automated mineralogy as part of a comprehensive NanoAnalysis system.

Hui Jiang and Matt Hiscock, of Oxford Instruments, with MEI's Amanda

The applications of automated mineralogy using the Tescan Integrated Mineral Analyser (TIMA), was discussed in one of yesterday's presentations.  This morning Marek Dosbaba, who is a Product Marketing Manager for microanalysis at Tescan Orsay Holding in Brno, Czechia discussed a novel segmentation method applied to automated mineralogy in the Tescan TIMA.

Marijn Boone and Marek Dosbaba of Tescan with Megan Becker

FRX online elemental analysers are now common instruments in many operations around the globe. Prior to the coffee break Juan Jose Frausto Gonzalez, Senior Technical Business Manager at Metso Outotec, Canada, showed how particle shape and size affect intensity levels in FRX online elemental analysers.

Authors jointly representing the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Multispectral Microscopic Technologies, Spain, presented the next two papers. Juan Carlos Catalina discussed automated ore characterisation by multispectral reflected light microscopy, and Úrsula Grunwald looked towards an upgrade of automated ore microscopy by shortwave infrared spectra.

Úrsula Grunwald and Juan Carlos Catalina with Thomas Riegler

As the global economy transitions towards decarbonization, infrastructure upgrades will increase the demand for copper by up to 350% worldwide by 2050. Cu-porphyry deposits are large tonnage low-grade intrusive mineral deposits that supply over three-quarters of the global copper resources. Continued Cu porphyry exploration and efficient mining practices are critical to meeting this rapid rise in demand. In the final paper of the conference, presented by Ben Eaton, an MSc researcher at the University of British Columbia, Canada, he discussed his research, aimed at developing new Cu-porphyry indicator mineral (IM) identification methods that will be highly applicable to process mineralogy.

Ben Eaton with Amanda and Jon

Following Ben's presentation, consultant Megan Becker briefly summarised the conference, remarking on how good it was to see so many young researchers presenting their work during the week.

MEI's Jon Wills then closed the conference, thanking all involved, sponsors, exhibitors, authors and delegates, and announcing that Process Mineralogy '24 will be held in Cape Town in November 2024.

A fine three days then ended with a farewell wine function in the atrium. 

I think I speak for everyone when I say that there is no substitute for face to face events. It has been great to enjoy the social interaction once more, and the camaraderie is obvious in the album of photographs which is now available. 

We now look forward to our next 'live' event, Comminution '23 in Cape Town in April.

@barrywills