SME Annual Meeting, Phoenix. Sunday

I arrived in Phoenix at 2200 local time yesterday, after a gruelling 22 hour journey from Falmouth. The security checks at the BA gate at Heathrow were intense and I would advise anyone thinking of travelling to the USA to think twice about it unless the journey is really necessary. Each passenger on the packed Boeing 747-400 was subjected to a body search and thorough hand-baggage inspection, which delayed the flight by an hour and a half.

Finally picking up my baggage, after an interminable wait at Phoenix immigration, I met up with Industrial Minerals’ Mike O’Driscoll and Ismene Clarke and shared a taxi to the Hyatt Regency Hotel. After a few hours' sleep, I was up and about in a jet-lagged state at 3am looking forward to the day ahead.

After venturing out into a cold and wet downtown Phoenix, I called in at a local café for breakfast, which should keep me going until the end of the week (thank God I brought my own coffee out with me though!), and then called in at the convention centre for early registration. The exhibition is slightly bigger than last year in Denver, with 630 booths, compared with 603, and over 3000 delegates are pre-registered, so final numbers are likely to be about the same as last year (over 4000).

The exhibition was formally opened in the late afternoon. I spent an hour there but only found one minerals engineer that I recognised, Pejman Oghazi of Lulea University, Sweden, who will be presenting a paper tomorrow, and also at Comminution ’10 next month.

Grinding Mill DEM Modelling

Jochen Franke, of Scanalyse Pty Ltd, Australia, asks:

I am currently exploring different tools for DEM of mills. So far I am looking at Paul Cleary's work at CSIRO in Melbourne and Millsoft (Raj Rajamany at University of Utah / PERI). John Herbst / Metso also have developed the capability but this doesn't seem to be readily available. At a simpler level there is Malcolm Powell's MillTraj, and the Molycop tools. There will be a Positron Emission Particle Tracking (PEPT) workshop during the Comminution '10 conference in Cape Town, but I assume this method is probably still in its infancy?
Is anybody aware of other DEM capabilities anywhere ? Any experiences with them ? Good ? Bad ? Ugly ?

An unrelated question is : it appears that so far really only liner manufacturers have used this kind of tool to market their wares. Is anybody out there on site or in company headquarters using DEM ? If so specifically what for ?

Would be great to hear comments...

Comminution ’10 set to be a major

The very full programme for Comminution ’10 is now almost finalised. Over the four days in April, 75 papers will be presented by authors representing industry and academia from 20 countries.

Already around 80 delegates have registered, and we have only 3 more exhibition booths available in the coffee and lunch area.

A company which is completely new to us, DMM, has just become our 7th sponsor. DMM is a South African company, active in the field of wear resistant ceramics, producing a range of ceramic micro beads with different compositions, densities and sizes for use in ultra fine grinding applications. Their market focus is on the high volume users, with specific emphasis on stirred mills such as the ISA and SMD systems.

Full details of the programme, registration and accommodation can be found on the conference website.

Only another week to the Phoenix SME

This time next week I will be at the SME Meeting in Phoenix.

My first SME Meeting was Denver in 1987, and then in the following year my only other visit to Phoenix. I’ve lost count of the number of SMEs I have attended, in Denver, Salt Lake City, Reno, Albuquerque, Cincinnati, but Denver is my favourite SME city, not just for the nearby ski resorts but also for its pleasant downtown area, particularly the 16th Street Mall.

There is always a feeling of déja vu with SME Meetings. No matter where they are held, they resemble large set pieces- the same impersonal registration booths in identical characterless convention centres, a large exhibition and a bewildering array of parallel sessions.

They are not exactly fun meetings, as the IMPCs have been in recent years, but, like the IMPCs, they are essentially great meeting places, the technical papers (in my opinion anyway) being secondary.

I only spend a couple of days at the meetings, and most of my time is spent strolling around the exhibition booths, catching up with old friends and always having a few surprises, bumping into old acquaintances from the past.

I will at the meeting Monday and Tuesday, so if you are going to be there, please let me know, and we may bump into each other!

19th Century tin mining around Perranporth

Barbara and I walked the magnificent Penhale Sands this afternoon, at Perranporth, less than 20 miles from Falmouth, on Cornwall’s rugged north coast.

Perranporth’s history is a mixture of mining and its association with the patron saint of Cornwall, St Piran. The author Winston Graham lived in Perranporth for many years and his famous Poldark novels, which were televised, are based on the history of the area and its local families. "Hendrawna Sands" in the novels is Perranporth beach.

The splendid beach of golden sand is 3 miles in length but for minerals people it is the cliffs that are of great interest. Evidence of the intense 19th Century coastal tin mining activity begins at Perranporth, and stretches westwards to Land’s End.

The cliffs are full of the relics of the mining which took place here. Look out for the many holes cut into the rock, which are known in Cornwall as adits, and were created by hand to drain the many nearby tin-mines.

More Cornish Walks
More on Cornish Mining
More on Cornwall

Grinding Mills Technology- a new LinkedIn Group

Igor Elias, of Scanalyse Pty Ltd, Chile, has formed a new group on LinkedIn. The main focus of the group, Grinding Mills Technology, is to provide a space for discussion of the most common topics related to SAG and Ball mills operations, maintenance, liner design and grinding circuits.

So if you are not already subscribed to the excellent LinkedIn, I would recommend that you do so, and don't forget to join the Minerals Engineers group too.