ABSTRACT
In 2012, a single module heavy medium cyclone plant (HMP) was installed at the Glencore Zinc’s (then Xstrata Zinc) McArthur River lead zinc mine. The HMP formed the first part of the MRM Phase 3 Project to increase run of mine (ROM) capacity from 2.4 to 5.5 Mt/a.
The purpose of the HMP...
17-Feb-2016
ABSTRACT
Over the 2012 to 2014 period, Anglo American Platinum (AAP) has been investigating the application of ore upgrading using XRF sensor technology sourced from Rados International, at Mintek South Africa. This has been in parallel with a more comprehensive sensor sorting investigation at th...
13-Feb-2016
Abstract
This paper compares the performance associated with both direct and reverse ball mill closed circuit configurations. Survey campaigns were carried out in both Samarco Mineração industrial plants, i.e., Concentrator I and Concentrator II. The former is equipped with a reverse-configured b...
12-Feb-2016
Abstract
Declining ore grade, leading to increased material transport and plant throughout requirements, is one of the major challenges in the current mining environment. This is accompanied by rising energy and labour costs, decreasing plant productivity and the requirement for highest plant avail...
20-Jan-2016
Abstract
Reduction of energy consumption at Jhamarkotra Phosphate concentrator of M/s Rajasthan State Mines and Minerals Ltd was achieved in three stages (1) stabilizing the through put as per the norms of the detailed feasibility report of the project to achieve energy consumption to 53 - 56 kWh...
17-Jan-2016
Day Two of the International Mining and Resources Conference down in Melbourne opened with a bang on Wednesday 11 November 2015. After a fascinating talk from McLaren Applied Technologies on how the F1 industry has innovated by applying existing technologies in different ways, Tony O'Neill, Technica...
02-Jan-2016
Ban Houayxai is a gold-silver mine operated by Phu Bia Mining Limited in Laos since 2012. The first two years of operation processed predominately soft oxidised ore but subsequent years were expected to process more fresh hard ore. Fragmentation of the fresh primary ores was also expected to be much...
01-Dec-2015
ENHANCED OPEN GEAR LUBRICANTS PROVIDE TANGIBLE BENEFITS FOR HEAVY INDUSTRY – THEY ARE THE ‘CLEAR’ CHOICE FOR IMPROVED OPEN GEAR RELIABILITY
ABSTRACT
The maintenance of large open gear systems at mines, power or cement plants present a significant challenge due to the heavy loads and harsh enviro...
01-Dec-2015
ABSTRACT
PT Newmont Nusa Tenggara – Batu Hijau site mine to mill program has been systematically improved and resulting in Geo-Metallurgical detailed ore characteristics is successfully being used for short and long term business planning and mill throughput predictions. Actual plant operating an...
30-Nov-2015
Abstract
As high grade ore deposits are depleted, remaining deposits are generally lower grade and require the mining and processing of larger volumes of material per tonne of product. These low grade deposits often contain a large proportion of barren gangue. Pre-concentration aims to remove this...
26-Nov-2015
Abstract
The effect of liner wear on SAG mill performance has gained much attention in recent years. It is commonly observed that the three key performance criteria of SAG milling; throughput, power and product size all improve as the liner wears.
The increase in throughput is generally ascrib...
26-Nov-2015
ABSTRACT
The benefits of pre-concentration using sensor-based sorting have been widely reported with the greatest potential impacts on low grade and high tonnage operations such those mining copper porphyry deposits. Due to the non-selective nature of bulk surface mining methods, significant quan...
25-Nov-2015
ABSTRACT
Blasting plays a major role in the fragmentation of rock in open pit mining, which is then crushed and processed before the final product is obtained. Tailoring the blasting method to suit rock mass characteristics can lead to significant improvements downstream. Mine to Mill is a method...
25-Nov-2015
ABSTRACT
Geoscan (using PGNAA) is used for multi-elemental analysis of conveyed bulk materials in real time measuring continuously through the full bed depth, and unaffected by belt speed, particle size, layering and dust levels. Tonnage weighted results are used to monitor quality, divert increm...
25-Nov-2015
Abstract
Selective comminution exploits differences in the comminution behavior of the various minerals an ore comprises. The wider the difference in a material property to be exploited the better the components accumulate in different fractions of the comminution product. The waste portion can be...
15-Nov-2015
Abstract
In addition to minerals displaying variations in grade within an ore body, blasted rock often concentrates particular minerals preferentially into finer size fractions. Grade engineering strategies seek to exploit intrinsic heterogeneity and grade variability to improve the viability of op...
15-Nov-2015
Abstract
The purpose of a mineral comminution circuit with a ball mill running in closed-loop with a hydrocyclone classification cluster is to feed the downstream process with the target particle size. Maintaining the optimal particle size in the flotation feed can significantly improve plant cash...
10-Oct-2015
Abstract
AngloGold Ashanti Ltd nominated Sunrise Dam Gold Mine as a case study via their involvement with the long-running Australian Mineral Industry Research Association (AMIRA) International P9P research program (AMIRA, 2015) . A group of researchers from the Global Comminution Collaborative (...
10-Oct-2015
Abstract
The comminution of commodity particles such as ore minerals in mining and metals from recycling of slags, armoured concrete, and incinerator slags by crushing, grinding, and milling makes up the biggest single cost factor in mineral processing. In spite of a marked lack in the developmen...
15-Sep-2015
ABSTRACT
In non-ferrous metal mining operations, it is generally necessary to crush and grind the ore to a very fine particle size to effectively liberate the contained mineral from the host rock. Fragmentation by blasting is the first stage of this comminution process. Numerous studies and indepen...
09-Sep-2015
Abstract
Over the last 30 years the average grade of ore bodies has significantly decreased while the proportion of waste removal has in many cases more than doubled. This in turn has led to a major increase in energy consumption and decrease in productivity across mining operations.
Metal preco...
09-Sep-2015
ABSTRACT
The stirred milling of nickel laterites offers possibilities for improving liberation and selective size reduction of soft nickel-bearing minerals in laterites. Batch grinding tests were performed in a netzsch™ lME4 stirred mill on siliceous goethitic, goethitic, and saprolitic nickel la...
13-Aug-2015
Fine grinding, to P80 sizes as low as 7 lm, is becoming increasingly important as mines treat ores with smaller liberation sizes. This grinding is typically done using stirred mills such as the Isamill or Stirred Media Detritor. While fine grinding consumes less energy than primary grinding, it can s...
13-Aug-2015
ABSTRACT
At the regrind or secondary grinding stages of base metal ores, the concern about energy efficiency is usually extremely important. In general, the specific energy consumption at this stage is higher than during the primary grinding stages. In addition, a tendency of finer grinding has bee...
21-Jul-2015
ABSTRACT
To recover more valuable ore and considering the complexity of minerals, the need to grind finer is increasing. To reach the desired fine grinding targets using the existing grinding media size, the energy consumption is increasing exponentially. As already proved at this conference, sma...
21-Jul-2015
Abstract
The UG2 ore in South Africa is exploited for its enrichment in the platinum group minerals (PGMs). Given that the PGMs are typically very fine grained, the potential for poor liberation is high, especially with conventional cyclones providing a poor split of the coarse silicates and fine c...
15-Jul-2015
ABSTRACT
Ore morphology plays a vital role during the milling and liberation of minerals. This study was carried out to understand the role of mineral crystallography and mineral interfaces on the milling and liberation processes. Data related to mineral crystallography, Vickers Hardness Number and...
15-Jul-2015
Abstract
The JKMRC has recently reported a novel ore pre-concentration method using high voltage electrical pulses (Part 1 of this paper). The technique utilises metalliferous grain-induced selective breakage under a controlled pulse energy input, and size-based screening to separate the feed ore i...
15-Jul-2015
ABSTRACT
Optimisation and control of comminution, pelletization, and agglomeration processes is a complex task with large potential for gains in productivity, energy efficiency, and particle size distribution quality. One factor in realising these gains is the requirement for fully-automated online...
13-Jun-2015
Abstract
There is increasing demand to optimise yield and increase capacity of crushing plants. Research in this area has resulted in the development of numerous optimisation tools, and recent research has shown that the quality aspects of production have great influence on the optimisation results...
12-Jun-2015
Abstract
A stirred milling model, based on the concept of shear–volume power, was developed and applied to geometries typically found in mineral processing systems. Generalising this model permits its use to model more complex mill geometries, such as those describing a tapered disk mill and the Co...
12-Jun-2015
015 iPAT Institut für Partikeltechnik
12-Jun-2015
ABSTRACT
Pre-concentration of precious metal and base metal ore types is becoming more relevant with the discovery, development and operation of many lower grade deposits around the world. The fluctuations in metal prices expose many mines to risks especially dealing with low and variable ore gr...
02-Jun-2015
Abstract
DRAMP was approached by the ARM/Lion Ore JV during July 2006 to conduct a feasibility study and Control Budget Estimate for a new Greenfield’s project for their NKOMATI Ni mine 45km east of Machadadorp. The scope included the evaluation and review of previous studies as well as a techno-...
17-Apr-2015
There are a lot of good reasons to manage energy use at mining operations. Optimizing process energy use reduces operating costs. Tracking energy use can help identify unplanned process changes or malfunctioning equipment early, which allows problems to be corrected promptly.
Sacré-Davey Engineer...
03-Apr-2015
Orway Mineral Consultants Ltd (OMC) as a consultancy has specialized in comminution circuit design for over 30 years. The OMC Power Model is OMC’s in-house software for specific grinding energy power-based circuit calculations. The model uses ore hardness parameters from testwork, circuit configurat...
03-Apr-2015
Niobec has been using vibrating screens and screw classifiers as a double stage classification in its grinding circuit since the very beginning of its operation in St- Honoré. Most of the other mineral processing plants around the world uses cyclones as the classification device in their grinding ci...
03-Apr-2015
New Gold Inc.’s New Afton concentrator commenced operation in June 2012, producing a copper-gold-silver concentrate. During the first two years of operation, various optimization efforts have improved mill throughput, recoveries and concentrate grade. Daily mill throughput has increased 20% above th...
03-Apr-2015
Abstract
Optimisation and better control of milling circuits require extensive modelling of milling data. This paper extends the enquiry to the use of the attainable region (AR) technique to determine the optimal residence time of ore in a ball mill. It also evaluates the energy requirements of the...
03-Apr-2015
Abstract
The total energy consumption for ore comminution will further increase within the next decades. One contribution to minimise the increase is to use more efficient comminution equipment. Vertical-roller-mills (VRM) are an energy-efficient alternative to conventional grinding technology. O...
03-Apr-2015
Abstract
Stirred mill power has been modelled empirically, adimensionally and computational intensively through the use of the discrete element method and computational fluid dynamics. To this range of power modelling efforts, one more is added through the development of a shear based power for s...
03-Apr-2015
CMP 2015
Orway Mineral Consultants Ltd (OMC) as a consultancy has specialized in comminution circuit design for over 30 years. The OMC Power Model is OMC’s in-house software for specific grinding energy power-based circuit calculations. The model uses ore hardness parameters from testwork, circui...
02-Apr-2015
The key themes for the 2014 Workshop were best practice and benchmarking. The workshop took place in Vancouver over a 2-day period. Each day included keynote speakers who set the scene for the participants prior to break our sessions for discussion. Keynote speaker topics included, but were not limi...
02-Apr-2015
Abstract
The surface chemistry and mineral liberation changes of a porphyry copper ore after high voltage pulse (HVP) electrical comminution have been investigated using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and mineral liberation analysis (MLA). Previous studies suggest that electrical comminutio...
28-Mar-2015
High Pressure Grinding Rolls (HPGR) technology is the continuous version of the confined particle-bed breakage. Feed size distribution has a key role in total specific energy consumption and product size reduction. Fines in the HPGR feed are defined as relatively small particles that should not unde...
16-Mar-2015
CITIC SMCC has developed a comprehensive system for the design and optimisation of comminution circuits, which is primarily based on the broad range of comminution simulation models developed by Dr. Stephen Morrell and validated against CITIC SMCC’s large industrial database generated by over 150 op...
16-Mar-2015
Developments in ore sorting technologies have provided the ability to achieve economic dry pre-concentration of ores prior to a grinding/concentration circuit and, in some cases, produce a high grade concentrate of sufficient quality for end use. The use of dual X-ray transmission (XRT) sorting has...
16-Mar-2015
Traditional motors for milling technology has relied on either Wound Rotor Induction, Low Speed Synchronous Motors, or Asynchronous Induction Motors with mechanical gear reducers. A new alternative is now offered: The Low Speed Asynchronous Motor. This alternative provides the benefit of reduced com...
16-Mar-2015
Multi-stage crushing plants, including high pressure grinding roll (HPGR) circuits, require more materials handling equipment than SAG and ball mill circuits. A temptation exists to neglect the energy consumption of materials handling when doing desktop comparisons of HPGR versus SAG milling circuit...
13-Mar-2015
The demand for minerals and metals is increasing. Head grades of ore bodies are dropping. Remaining ores are becoming finer grained, more complex, and more logistically challenging. Mineral processing – in particular comminution – already consumes a huge amount of energy. But in 20 years’ time, it w...
13-Mar-2015