Prof. Graeme Jameson's lifetime of flotation research will be highlighted at Flotation '23

Prof Graeme Jameson, Distinguished Emeritus Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia, is probably our profession's most prolific and respected innovator in froth flotation. In 2018 he was honoured by one of the most prestigious organisations in the world, the Royal Society, which boasts a fellowship of 1,600 of the world’s most eminent scientists. Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS, a rare and distinguished honour, is decided by a peer-review process based on excellence in science, and this was bestowed on Prof. Jameson for his work on fluid and particle mechanics, and especially the flotation process. Graeme joined scientists of the calibre of the late Stephen Hawking, and a galaxy of renowned scientists such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Tim Burners-Lee, the inventor of the internet.

Graeme has many awards, including the IMPC Lifetime Achievement Award and over the years he has become a great friend to the MEI family, having contributed in major ways to all but one of our flotation conferences. It's not every day that you can boast of having pizzas in a shopping mall with the family and a FRS, as we did with Graeme in Cape Town in 2019!

Graeme is 87 years old this year, and has announced that this will be his retirement year, although I have serious doubts about this. He will be back at the Vineyard Hotel, Cape Town, in November for Flotation '23 and will be opening the conference with a keynote lecture “Mostly froth and bubble – a lifetime of flotation research”.

Prof. Jameson has recognised for many years the need to improve the performance of flotation cells as head grades have declined, and ores have become more complex. Since its inception for base metal recovery at Broken Hill in 1905, mechanical flotation machines have been developed that are very efficient for a particular range of particle sizes. For base metals, this range is typically between about 75 to 125 µm. Recoveries of fine and ultrafine particles below 75 µm decline with decreasing particle size. Such particles can be recovered by mechanical cells with a rotor and stator, by using long residence times. At the other end of the size spectrum, recoveries start to decline with increasing particle size, and there is a limit beyond which they are essentially zero, even with fully liberated minerals. 

Graeme Jameson first saw a flotation cell when he took his first job in the assay laboratory of a tin smelter in Sydney, Australia at age sixteen. It had been used to recover bismuth and other trace metals for use in bearing metals for the war effort. While studying part-time for a degree in chemical engineering, he became interested in the dynamics of bubbles and particles, an interest he continued when he went to study for a PhD with Dr John Davidson at Cambridge in the UK. On graduation, he went to the oil industry in the US for two years after which he joined Imperial College London. Here, he met Dr Joe Kitchener, a well-known flotation surface chemist in the Royal School of Mines. 

Knowing of his interest in bubbles and particles, in 1969 Dr Kitchener encouraged Graeme to focus his research on physical aspects of flotation, seeking first to discover why fine particles were so slow to float, and then to develop new machines that would overcome the barriers. 

Prof. Jaemson's presentation at Flotation '23 will describe the research and outcomes that have led to the introduction of three new flotation machines: the Jameson Cell, licensed to Mt Isa Mines Ltd, then Xstrata Technology and now Glencore Technology, Brisbane; the Concorde Cell for ultrafines and rheologically-challenging ores, licensed to Metso, Helsinki; and the NovaCell for coarse particles, licensed to Jord International, Sydney. The keynote will be followed by presentations on innovative developments in flotation machines, including Graeme's inventions.

Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Jameson Cell at Flotation '19

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