MetPlant 2019 - Day 2

After a quick breakfast of pastries and fruit, kindly provided by Glencore Technology, who are also sponsoring MEI's Flotation '19 and Comminution '20 conferences, Janine Herzig once again welcomed us to the event.

Today's programme began with Session 5: Keynotes to challenge current thinking, and consisted of three consecutive keynote presentations followed by a 25 minute Q&A discussion.

Kathy Ehrig, of BHP Olympic Dam, began the day with Effect of Gangue Material on Flow Sheet Design and Plant Operation - Olympic Dam.

This was followed by Metallurgical Accounting in Practice: Performance Non-Negotiables presented by Aidan Giblett of Newmont Goldcorp Corporation and The Definition of Project Success from Dean David of Wood.

There followed a half hour coffee break with three eposter presentations.

I met Robert Jr Palme at the coffee station, from Porgera Joint Venture, who presented an interesting paper yesterday afternoon, Porgera Post Earthquake Learnings. An earthquake of magnitude 7.5 knocked out the power station supplying the mine last year, and Robert detailed the operational ingenuity employed, the decision making processes, and learnings of the process plant in the 3 months following the earthquake while the plant was run using generators providing only 10-15MW.

Robert Jr Palme (Porgera Joint Venture)

Harold Danilkewich (Woodgrove Technologies) and 

Peter Colvin (Consolidated Minerals), who I last saw at 

Flotation '03 in Helsinki, it was good to have a reminisce!

Session 6: Optimisation of Existing Operations consisted of papers dealing with improved recovery at Boddington, Tarkwa and Syama gold mines followed by a 20 minute Q&A discussion.

Over the hour's lunch break I caught up with Scott Doig of FloCEP, who I had sat next to at last night's dinner. Scott introduced me to FloCEP's MAXbend and FLOdistributor which can be retrofitted to existing equipment, restoring plant efficiency and reducing maintenance costs.

Scott Doig (FloCEP)

Austbrokers Countrywide ran a competition to win a drone and here Sales &
Marketing Manager Matt Crewe hands the prize to the winner, Robert Rejall
(Innovative Filtration Solutions)

At the Process IQ booth: Pieter Strobos, Emily Mort (St Barbara), Adrian Paine, Stuart Nuttall, Paula Cairns

Dimitra Pierros (BHP Nickel West) and Tryphena Mitchell (Solvay)

After lunch, the rest of the day followed the same format as yesterday, with each session starting with a keynote lecture and then three further papers and a 20 minute Q&A discussion.

Session 7: Implementation of technology had a keynote from Stephen Morrell of SMC Testing, entitled How to Formulate  an Effective Ore Comminution Characterisation Program.

After the Q&A discussion Alison Keogh, CEEC Chief Executive, presented the 2019 CEEC Award to Graeme Jameson and Cagri Emer, for their paper, published in Minerals Engineering, entitled, Coarse chalopyrite recovery in a universal froth flotation machine.

CEEC Chief Executive Alison Keogh with the 2019 CEEC Medal winners Graeme Jameson and Cagri Emer (photo credit: Chris Sykes)

During the coffee break I met up with some more people.

Luke Bennett and Chad Koch of thyssenkrupp

The Russell Mineral Equipment booth: Lucinda Talbot, David McKewen, Tarnya McBurney, Trent Donges. RME are sponsoring MEI's Comminution '20 event in Cape Town

Session 8: Control Methodologies and Plant Design III began with the keynote Process Innovation and Intellectual Property: Is there really a Business Case? from Peter Munro of Mineralis Consultants.

This session ended with three awards presentations. The Innovation Award, made of black granite from South Australia and sponsored by Russell Mineral Equipment was presented by John Russell (Russell Mineral Equuipment) and Janine Herzig (MetVal Consulting & President of the AusIMM) to Zac Hearne (Independence Group NL) and his co-authors Jody Crow (Independence Group NL)  and Greg Gomes (Independence Group NL) for Improved recovery through changes in operating philosophies at IGO's Nova Operation.

Winners of the Innovation Award Greg Gomes, Zac Hearne and Jody Crow pictured with the judges, including John Russell (right)  (photo credit: Chris Sykes)

Then the awards for Best Paper and Best Presentation were made by Janine Herzig to Will Downie (MMG), for his paper Application of a Net Smelter Return Model to Maximise Value at the Rosebery Polymetallic Base Metal Processing Plant and Duncan Bennett  (Mineralis Consultants), for his presentation entitled Simple Recipe Guide to Designing Effective Gravity Concentration Circuits.

After that, all that was left was for Janine Herzig to close the conference with a quick round up of the take-home themes from the event.  Most importantly, be proud, work hard, celebrate your wins and we'll celebrate with you!

Many thanks to the AusIMM for the smooth running of this event and allowing me to come and report on it. I had a great time catching up with new friends and old and hope to return again.

Amanda Wills @MEI_Conferences

MetPlant 2019 - Day 1

The 11th AusIMM Metallurgical Plant Design & Operating Strategies (MetPlant 2019) event was held from September 9-10, 2019, at the Crown Perth in Western Australia. MEI was a Media Partner.

Janine Herzig

Following the GD Delprat Distinguished Lecture, given by J-P Franzidis, and Welcome Reception held the night before, Monday morning began with a welcome from the conference convenor, Janine Herzig of Metval Pty Ltd and the current President of the AusIMM.

Janine informed us that this year's MetPlant had welcomed a record number of delegates, over 400, a record number of sponsors and a record number of exhibitors. 32 papers had been accepted for presentation, allowing the event to maintain a single stream, posters had been accepted for the first time, and an Innovation Award had been implemented (sponsored by MEI's Comminution '20 sponsor, Russell Mineral Equipment) for the first time.

Stephen Durkin

Janine also paid tribute to David Pollard, the original MetPlant convenor, who sadly passed away last year.

The event was then officially opened by Stephen Durkin, CEO of the AusIMM. Stephen also emphasised the record numbers and stated that these included over 50 international delegates from 18 countries.

Talking about the decision to hold MetPlant in Perth, we were told that 1 in 10 working people in Western Australia work in the mining industry, with the industry contributing billions of dollars to the economy every year, making Perth the perfect location to hold such an event.

Stephen went on to give a brief history of the AusIMM, which was founded in 1893 and has 13,000 members in 100 different countries.

Session 1: Transformational case studies began with a keynote presentation by John Vagenas of Metallurgical Systems entitled, The Stages of Digital Transformation, followed by two more papers and then a 15 minute Q&A discussion on the three presentations.

Richmond Asamoah of the Uni. of South
Austrailia with his poster Effect of cyanide
concentrations on leaching of Jarosite-Bearing
bio-oxidised flotation gold concentrates

We then had a half hour coffee break in the exhibition hall, where the eposter sessions were also being held. This was an interesting new technology which I have not experienced before. Two screens were set up at the back of the hall, on which electronic posters were displayed (see photo). Each poster presenter then had a 10 minute slot in which to present his poster to whoever had gathered to watch.

Whilst this is very technologically advanced, and I'm sure the authors appreciated not having to print their posters or risk losing them on a plane, it did mean that you needed to be very organised with your time in order to view a poster you were interested in.

Session 2: Plant Design I kicked off with the second keynote of the day, Lessons Learnt from Smaller Projects Applied to Big Projects - Surely it Must be Easy? by Greg Lane of Auscenco.

There then followed three more papers and a 20 minute Q&A discussion before breaking for an hour for a delicious buffet lunch, again in the exhibition area, and another eposter session.

I had the opportunity to explore the exhibition area at this point and chat to new faces and old.

Randolph Pax of Rap Innovation and Development - a frequent visitor to MEI Conferences

Nicola Semler of South32, with whom I
had an interesting chat about future proofing mines through digitisation

Hanging out at the Magotteaux booth were Mike Battersby (Maelgwyn Minerals), Alan Hitchiner (Evonik Australia), Christopher Greet (Magotteaux), Alison Keogh (CEEC) and Chris Ypelaan (Anglogold Ashanti Australia)
Magotteaux are sponsoring MEI's Flotation '19 & Comminution '20, Maelgwyn Minerals are sponsoring Flotation '19, and CEEC are Industry Advocates for Comminution '20 and Sustainable Minerals '20.

The Eriez Flotation booth, Eriez Flotation are another sponsor of Flotation '19

Session 3: Plant Design II began with a third keynote presentation, this time from Joe Pease of Mineralis Consultants, entitled Mining Silicon Valley. Three more papers followed plus a 15 minute Q&A discussion, before stopping for a half hour coffee break and more networking.

A selfie with Graeme Jameson, one of the winners of this
year's CEEC Medal

Darryl Harris (Outotec) & Bruno Sceresini (Australian Mining Advisors)
Outotec are sponsoring MEI's Flotation '19 and Comminution '20

Chih-Ting Lo (CEEC) & Joe Pease (Mineralis
Consultants)

The last session of the day, Session 4: Flotation and Surface Chemistry, began with a keynote presentation from John Ralston of the University of South Australia entitled Interfacial Science - a Critical Enabler in Hydrometallurgy and Mineral Processing.

Following John were 3 more papers, plus the 15 minute Q&A before Janine Herzig rounded off the day with some closing remarks. Then it was straight back into the exhibition area for some networking drinks before the Conference Dinner.

Edoardo Sommacal (Matec Pacfic), Michael McMaster (Clariant), and Tony Thompson (InterChem)
Clariant are sponsors of Flotation '19

Tom Gibbons (Veritas Metallica), Dave Wiseman (David Wiseman Pty Ltd), and
Stephen Flatman (Maelgwyn Minerals)

Tryphena Mitchell (Solvay) & Simon Loro (Evolution Mining)
Solvay sponsored the evening's Conference Dinner and are sponsors of Flotation '19

The Conference Dinner was held in the Astral Ballroom at the Crown Perth and was sponsored by Solvay, and Stuart Emery, Regional Sales Director at Solvay gave a short speech to start the night off, after which we were treated to a delicious menu, with a choice of mains, complemented by quality wine - or at least the red was in my opinion!

The Conference Dinner rounded off Day 1 at MetPlant 2019

Amanda Wills @MEI_Conferences

AusIMM MetPlant 2019 Welcome Reception

The AusIMM's MetPlant 2019 conference kicked off tonight at the Crown Perth's Astral Ballroom with the GD Delprat Distinguished Lecture, given by J-P Franzidis and entitled "Mining and Society". The lecture series celebrates the life of Guillaume Daniel Delprat, who was an engineer and metallurgist, and a pioneer of Australian mining industry.

Mining has been a part of human history for millennia and has been integral to the development of what we now call society. Mining has given us coins, cannons and computers; it has also produced legacy effects that will endure for centuries to come. J-P's lecture explored the history of mining and society, the impacts of society on mining, and mining and society in the 21st century and beyond. In particular, it tried to address the perception of mining companies as “unscrupulous, environmentally destructive, exacerbating the poverty of local communities while creating wealth only for an elite, and destroying the social fabric of communities.”

J-P Franzidis presenting "Mining and Society"

Immediately following the lecture, was the Welcome Reception, with the opportunity to network with drinks and canapes. I bumped into some old friends and was pleased to meet some people that I'd previously only conversed with via email.


The Welcome Reception at MetPlan 2019

J.P. Franzidis (Uni. of Cape Town) and Dennis Thamm 



Mike Battersby (Maelgwyn Mineral Services), Janine Herzig (MetVal Consulting &
President of the AusIMM), Alison Keogh (CEEC Chief Executive) &
Chih-Ting Lo (CEEC Advocate)

Gregor Borg & Oscar Scharfe of PMS Handelskontor

Amanda Wills @MEI_Conferences

European Symposium on Comminution and Classification (ESCC '19)

The European Symposium on Comminution and Classification (ESCC) started over 55 years ago, held mainly in Germany with the past two Symposia held in Sweden and Turkey, and on September 2-4 for the very first time in UK, at the University of Leeds.

The iconic University of Leeds Parkinson Building

Sponsorship support was provided by DEM Solutions, ESSS, Freeman Technology, Hosokawa Micron, IFPRI, MEI, Quadro, Retsch, Surface Measurement Systems, WAB and Ytron.

Around 80 extended abstracts were received, which were scheduled for two parallel oral presentation sessions and two evening poster sessions along with exhibitions by the symposium sponsors. There were three plenary and six keynote lectures from leaders in the field, outlining the recent progress relevant to chemical and allied, food, mineral and pharmaceutical industries. The programme included the following themes: fundamentals of size reduction, innovations in milling and classification, nanomilling, mechano-chemistry and solid state transformations, pharmaceuticals and foods, attrition and wear, and related modelling. The notable number of abstracts received on modelling made it possible to divide them into sub-themes: mechanistic, population balance, discrete element and coupling with computational fluid dynamics.

The extended abstracts are available for download as a pdf file, and it is planned to make them searchable and available for future reference via the University of Leeds website.  The Elsevier journal Powder Technology will publish a selection of the contributions in extended full manuscript.

Monday September 2nd

After a brief opening by the conference chairman, Prof. Mojtaba Ghadiri, of the University of Leeds, who welcomed the 103 delegates, 36% from UK and 26% from Germany, the first plenary lecture was given by Arno Kwade, of Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany.

Mojtaba Ghadiri and Arno Kwade

The most used energy storage system today is the lithium-ion battery, and Prof. Kwade discussed how mills are used for particle breakage and particle dispersing within the long process chain from the raw material to the final lithium-ion battery cell and its recycling at end of life.

Following the keynote the morning split into parallel sessions on Fundamentals, and Mechanistic Modelling of Size Reduction.

There were two keynotes in the afternoon session.

Lian Liu

Lian Liu of the University of Surrey, UK, showed how predictive modelling of comminution processes is essential for improving the process design, process optimisation, quality control and reducing operational cost. In her talk, two examples of dynamic mill models based on the population balance model were presented. The first one is for tumbling mills such as ball and SAG/AG mills used in the mining industry. The mill models for tumbling mills were developed in a generic dynamic model structure which incorporates ore breakage characteristics, transport, classification along the mill, a discharge function, and energy consumption.

Surface properties are critical for pharmaceutical manufacturing with an increasing trend towards the use of fine particles in pharmaceutical development where the surface will be increasingly important. Milling is often a unit operation of choice for size reduction in pharmaceutical processing although a range of surface changes can occur in crystalline solids subsequently affecting further processing, handling and performance. Jerry Heng, of Imperial College, UK showed that crystalline materials are anisotropic and milling results in the generation of new surfaces exposing different crystal facets varying in facet specific surface energy.

The International Fine Particle Research Institute hosted a reception in the evening to coincide with the display of the thirteen posters submitted.

 

Tuesday September 3rd

The day began with a plenary lecture by Michael Juhnke, of Novartis Pharma AG, who discussed the production of engineered drug particles by size reduction techniques, providing case studies for commercialized products where size reduction techniques could provide an essential element to enable key drug product features.

In a mid-morning keynote Wolfgang Peukert, of Institute of Particle Technology, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany showed how milling at the nanoscale is a fascinating field involving aspects of nanomechanics, internal defect formation and defect stability, colloid and formulation science as well as mechanochemistry. Inorganic and organic nanoparticles including drug particles, novel 2D materials such as graphene or boron nitride and even nanoemulsions can be produced this way.

Wolfgang was a keynote speaker at Comminution '14, and is shown below (right) with fellow Comminution '14 keynote speakers Tim Napier-Munn and Alan Muir.

Luís Marcelo Tavares, of Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is a familiar face at MEI's comminution conferences, and will be a keynote speaker at Sustainable Minerals '20 next year. In the first of the afternoon's keynotes Marcelo discussed how the discrete element method (DEM) is a powerful tool to describe the behaviour of particulate flows. However, in some cases, breakage is not taken into account, leading to biased results. This becomes critical for simulations where particle flow and particle size reduction cannot be properly decoupled. The Tavares breakage model, implemented in the commercial platform Rocky DEM, takes in consideration important rock behaviour based on the energy dissipated in a contact to determine if a particle will break or not, specifying the progeny size distribution generated on a breakage event.

The final keynote lecture of the day was given by Steffen Sander, of Hosokawa Alpine Aktiengesellschaft, Germany, who showed how air classification utilising deflector wheel classifiers has been state of the art in powder processing for many decades. The micro processes taking place inside these machines are still not fully revealed and remain subject to further investigations and he gave some examples of technical solutions to meet the requirements.

The day ended with a fine conference dinner at University House, with an entertaining after dinner talk from Jonathan Seville, Professor of Formulation Engineering at the University of Birmingham. Jonathan was for many years editor-in-chief of Elsevier's Powder Technology.

Conference chairman Mojtaba Ghadiri, with (clockwise) Wolfgang Peukert, Jonathan Seville, Arno Kwade,
Iain and Nicky Crosley, Willie Hendrickson and Lian Liu

Klaas Van der Wielen, Rudolf Landsmann and Marko Hilden

Paul Cleary with Barbara and Barry Wills

 

Marcelo Tavares, Mojtaba Ghadiri, Aubrey Mainza and Malcolm Powell

 Wednesday September 4th

The final day began with a plenary lecture from Malcolm Powell, of the University of Queensland's JKMRC, and a regular contributor to MEI's comminution conferences, who said that it is high time to dramatically upgrade historic empirical comminution models, that are based on back-fitted breakage rates, to mechanistic models. He presented an approach to embracing the available computational power and the progress in understanding of comminution systems to rewrite models to be predictive and reliable with respect to the range of conditions to be encountered in the current and future devices we use in industry. Underpinning such an approach is the need for appropriate measurement of breakage properties, that include mineral association, that respond to the range of conditions encountered in comminution equipment for mineral processing.

Malcolm is the founder of the Global Comminution Collaborative (GCC), a collaboration between the JKMRC in Australia, Sweden's Chalmers University, the University of Cape Town, Germany's Technische Universitat Braunschweig, the University of Rio de Janeiro, and Turkey's Haceteppe University, all, apart from Turkey, being represented in Leeds this week. 

GCC members Malcolm Powell (Australia), Arno Kwade (Germany), Magnus Evertsson (Sweden),
Aubrey Mainza (South Africa), Marcelo Tavares (Brazil) and Hakan Benzer (Turkey) at Comminution '14

GCC stalwart Aubrey Mainza, of the University of Cape Town, has been a long-time consultant to MEI's comminution series and in the final keynote lecture he showed how integrating classification into circuits during design and equipment selection is an important aspect in developing robust comminution circuits.

ESCC '19 has been a very well organised conference, so congratulations to Prof. Ghadiri and his team. The final act of the day was the presentation of prizes, sponsored by DEM Solutions, to the best student presentations. Well done Lori Gonnet of IMT Mines Albi, France, and Paul Fabio Prziwara of Technische Universitat Braunschweig, Germany.

ESCC '21 will be held in Toulouse, France, the exact dates yet to be finalised.

@barrywills

Back in Cornwall after our brief visit to Leeds

Barbara and I are back in Cornwall again after a 7 hour train journey from Leeds, where I have been attending the European Symposium on Comminution and Classification, held at the University.

Leeds University during the 60s was a red brick University of around 7000 students. Now it is barely recognisable from those days, a huge modern campus housing 36,000 students. Even the Houldsworth School of Applied Science, where I spent 6 years, was unrecognisable, and my old department of metallurgy no longer exists, now being materials.

Just around the corner from the Houldsworth was the Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering, which shut its doors 20 years ago. Now Camborne School of Mines in the only institute in UK offering degrees in mining.

I had no interest in mining during my time at Leeds University in the 1960s so was unaware of the existence of nearby Middleton Park, an area which was intensively mined for coal in the 18th and 19th centuries. Barbara and I spent a very interesting morning there earlier in the week prior to the conference.

The Middleton Railway is now a heritage track carrying passengers to and from the Park to the excellent Railway Museum.

Originally the railway was built in the 18th century to supply the growing 18th century industries and households of Leeds with coal. In those days the state of the roads meant that it cost more to get the coal into Leeds than it did to get the coal out of the ground.  An Act of Parliament was passed in 1758 to allow the building of the railway and coal soon began to be transported from the mines at Middleton to Leeds Bridge. The original track was wooden and horses hauled single wagon loads into town. By the 1800s, the war with Napoleon had caused the price of horses and feed to rise dramatically and it was decided to convert the railway to steam.

Leeds itself has obviously changed enormously in half a century, but some of the pubs that I used to frequent (The Eldon, The Pack Horse) are still as scruffy as ever, but my favourite cinema, the Odeon on the Headrow is now a Sports Direct store. Hard to believe that I heard the Beatles performing live in there in 1964!

The former Odeon Headrow

In my final year as an undergraduate I shared a seedy flat with two fellow metallurgists in Headingley, close to the Yorkshire County Cricket ground, where Ben Stokes performed his Ashes heroics little over a week ago. In those far off days I had little interest in Cistercian monasteries so never visited nearby Kirkstall Abbey, as Barbara and I did on Wednesday afternoon at the end of ESCC '19.

This magnificent ruin, on the banks of the River Aire, is the remains of a monastery founded in the middle of the 12th century. It was disestablished in 1539 , during the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII and awarded to Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, but reverted to the crown when Cranmer was executed for treason in 1556.  

It's been an interesting week in Leeds, but disappointing as a nostalgia trip. As they say, never go back, in my case it just made me feel bloody old!

But despite the many changes, one thing that has not changed is the friendliness of the Yorkshire people - and that's praise indeed from someone with allegiance to the Red Rose!

Twitter @barrywills

In Leeds for the European Symposium on Comminution and Classification

It's good to be back in Leeds, particularly to attend a conference at my alma mater, Leeds University, which I left 50 years ago this month to depart to Zambia and the beginning of my career in the mining industry.

The 16th European Symposium on Comminution and Classification (ESCC 2019) begins today, and MEI is the media partner. ESCC started over 55 years ago, held mainly in Germany with the past two Symposia held in Sweden and Turkey, and now for the very first time in UK. I have attended only one in the past, at Braunschweig in 2013.

There were a number of familiar faces at last night's Welcome Reception and I look forward to an interesting week, which will include a little nostalgia, visiting my old haunts, if I can find them, or if they still exist after half a century.

With organising committee chairman Mojtaba Ghadiri and familiar faces from Australia
Paul Cleary of CSIRO, Grant Ballantyne of Ausenco and Malcolm Powell of JKMRC

On the other side of the world, two other major conferences take place next week in Perth, Western Australia.

MetPlant 2019 begins next Monday, and is followed by World Gold 2019 on Wednesday. MEI is a media partner at both events, and Amanda will be there to represent us, and to report back on people and innovations. So if you are in Perth next week, look out for Amanda, she loves to talk to people!

Twitter @barrywills