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By R. J. Corfield

MODERNIZATION of the entire electrical system and improvement of Rotation process efficiency is the twofold goal of the improvement program underway at the Arthur and Magna concentrators of the Utah Copper Div., Kennecott Copper Corp. Copper ore from the Bingham pit goes to these two concentrators where an interlocking program calls for complete electrical modernization and increased flotation process efficiency through additional capacity and flow scheme revisions. Flotation plants at the two mills are essentially duplicates, and while this article deals with the changes at the Arthur mill similiar improvements are being made at the Magna mill.

Jan 3, 1953

By Roman Y. Poderny, Vladimir V. Rjevskii

In the USSR, the Moscow Institute of Radio Electronics tronics and Mining Electro-Mechanics (MIRGEM) has started what it hopes will become a nationwide movement to educate mining students in the precise specialties that industry has come to require. Courses for mining engineers, the MIRGEM faculty proposes, should dovetail as exactly as possible with specific jobs available in the mining profession. Acting upon this thesis, MIRGEM revised its own curriculum in 1962 and has since presented an over-all plan for Soviet mining education before two mining school conferences as well as the Ministry of Higher Education and a number of major Soviet industrial ministries. The plan was universally approved with some suggested revisions. SOVIET MINING EDUCATION TODAY At present, mining education in the Soviet Union covers the exploitation of solid minerals and raw materials, including coal as well as ferrous and nonferrous metals. The extraction, storage, and refining of oil and gas is treated as a separate discipline. In all, there are 33 Soviet universities and institutes that train mining engineers for careers in the industrial, research and educational fields.

Jan 9, 1966

By AIME AIME

SECTION DELEGATES were given an opportunity to see how the machinery of Institute administration functions, on Tuesday evening, Feb. 16, when they were the' guests at the regular monthly meeting of the Directors. Of the new board of 25 members, 19 were present at the meeting, including directors from Seattle, Los Angeles, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Chicago and Pitts-burgh, the new junior past-president from Jerome, Ariz., and the new president from .Washington, D. C. The complete list of the 72 in attendance at the dinner,: held in the main dining room of the Engineers' Club, which pre-ceded the general session of the Directors'. meeting, follows:

Jan 1, 1932

By J. A. SINGMASTERN

THE New Jersey Zinc Co.'s vertical retort plants are believed to have been in continuous operation through the whole year. At Palmerton metal purer than that made from the same ore in the old plant has been produced and has been able to compete successfully with very pure electrolytic metal in die castings and other special uses where extreme purity is worth money. A new plant using this process was put in production by the Grasselli Chemical Co. at Meadowbrook, W. Va., early in the summer. It is said to be working very satisfactorily. It is understood that this plant will not produce high-grade metal. Two patents issued to Bunce and Mahler (Nos. 1,749,126 and 1,749,127) describe a method of operating the vertical retort so that practically lead-free metal can be obtained from ores containing consider- able lead. The zinc vapors and other gases leaving the reaction zone are filtered through a column of material maintained at a temperature high enough to prevent much zinc from condensing. The filtering medium is either periodically or continuously changed.

Jan 1, 1931

By C. H. Gorski

A method for preparing titanium tetrachloride is described which consists of reducing rutile with coke and chlorinating the reduced product at 200° to 500°C. The crude distillate is purified by treatment with copper powder and distillation. Recoveries, exceeding 90 pct of the titanium in the rutile, were obtained. IN recent years considerable interest in metallic titanium has been aroused because of its outstanding physical and chemical properties. The present commercial processes for preparing titanium are modifications of the Kroll1 process and consist essentially of the reduction of titanium tetrachloride with magnesium in an inert atmosphere to produce metallic titanium with magnesium chloride as a byproduct. At present,' commercial titanium tetrachloride costs $0.32 a pound, which makes the price of the included titanium $1.28 a pound. As the titanium tetrachloride must be purified further before processing into metal, its ultimate cost obviously will be higher. Consequently, one of the prime requisites for the production of lower cost titanium metal is a source of low-cost titanium tetrachloride. Recently, Knickerbocker, Gorski, Kenworthy, and Starliper3 escribed a method for preparing titanium tetrachloride from low-grade Arkansas rutile by smelting the rutile with pyrite and coke to form a titanium matte and then chlorinating the titanium matte to prepare a crude titanium tetrachloride. This process had several inherent advantages. Low-grade rutile concentrates were utilized, the chlorination temperature was relatively low (approximately 200°C), and the reaction was strongly exothermic. However, this process had several disadvantages, chief of them being the rather low recoveries of titanium tetrachloride (65 to 81 pct) and the difficulty in purifying the crude titanium tetrachloride obtained. Because of the high-titanium and low-iron con- tents of rutile as compared to ilmenite, rutile should be of greater potential value as a source of titanium tetrachloride than ilmenite. Rutile, however, is not chlorinated directly in commercial practice, because reaction temperatures above 700 °C are required, at which point chlorine attacks most of the common materials of construction. The process now in use consists of converting the titanium in rutile to the cyanonitride by high-temperature reduction in an electric furnace, and then chlorinating this compound. The disadvantages of this process are the difficulty of producing the cyanonitride, the use of high-grade rutile concentrates in the charge, and the presence of several percent of silicon tetrachloride in the finished product. It would be of considerable interest to develop a new process for the preparation of titanium tetrachloride from rutile by chlorination at 200" to 500°C. Process Development Several investigators'-' have studied the reduction of titanium dioxide with carbon in an effort to prepare titanium monoxide. Invariably, the titanium monoxide formed in this manner was not pure, as it contained titanium carbide and one or more of the lower oxides of titanium. As these lower oxides of titanium are more reactive chemically than rutile, and as it is known that titanium carbide may be chlorinated readily, a study was made of the chlorination of carbon-reduced rutile. A sample of rutile concentrates from Hot Spring County, Ark., containing 76.19 pct TiO,, 5.65 pct Fe2O3, 4.18 pct SiO2, and 2.88 pct Al2O3, was used for this investigation. The experimental procedure consisted of making an intimate mixture of —100-mesh rutile and petroleum coke, adding water and molasses as a binder to foi-m a paste, charging into a graphite crucible that was covered, except for a vent to allow the

Jan 1, 1952

By E. G. Banks

THIS paper is presented in the belief that metallurgists and chemists will be interested in the practice of grinding in tube-mills in connection with stamps, especially since the records of working here given extend over a lengthy period of time (since May, 1905). The ore from the Waihi mine-more especially that produced in the upper levels-contains a large proportion of hard, chalcedonic quartz, and the gold exists in an exceedingly fine state, conditions which necessitate very fine crushing in order to ob¬tain a high extraction of the precious metal. Before the introduction of tube-mills at the 90-stamp Waihi mill, it was found necessary to stamp through 40-mesh (1,600 holes per sq. in.) woven wire-screens, having a fairly high discharge. The pulp then graded

Jan 1, 1907

By P. J. Carroll, H. Colijn

Feeders must be considered an integral part of the over-all bin and feeder system. Improper design of either one of these parts will affect the performance of the whole system. Feeder load, material properties, feed rate, physical layout, and environment as well as first cost determine the selection of feeder type. This paper provides a new method of calculating feeder loads with some experimental data as verification. General design criteria for belt and apron feeder, rotary table and plow feeders are discussed and a special section is devoted to vibratory feeders. Feeders are used to provide a means of control for the withdrawal of bulk materials from storage units such as bins, bunkers, silos and hoppers. This control function can only be performed properly as long as the bulk materials flow by gravity to the feeder in a uniform and uninterrupted fashion. During the past few years various papers have been written and presented on feeders and their application.1-9 This paper will be confined to some specific bin-feeder design criteria such as feeder load and power requirements. Special attention is given to the basic design criteria for vibratory feeders. HOPPER AND BIN DESIGN Feeders must be considered an integral part of the over-all bin and feeder system. Improper design of either one of these parts will affect the performance of the whole system. A lot of effort has been devoted in the past decade to the development of functional design criteria for hoppers and bins.1,10 The integrated concept of bin and feeder design requires quantitative analysis of the bulk material characteristics before the design and the selection of components can be attempted. The design of a feeder system must begin with the proper dimensioning of the hopper outlet to prevent arching or ratholing. The hopper opening should be large enough to allow passage of the bulk solid at the required maximum discharge rate." A feeder can only throttle the flow. FEEDER LOAD DETERMINATION Over the past ten years, there have been various attempts to determine the exact load or pressure on feeders mounted directly under hopper openings. Many designers, however, still consider this pressure equal to the hydrostatic head of material above the opening, and because such pressure would be very

Jan 1, 1969

By Frank Firmstone, Kenneth Robertson

Peculiar crusts having appeared on certain irons made at Glendon and Pequest, which, in our experience, were entirely new, some analyses of them were made; and these analyses, together with an account of the manner of appearance of the crusts, are herewith submitted to the Institute. At Pequest the ores mere: & Peters, from Ringwood, N. J.; + roasted sulphurous ore, from Charlotteburgh, N. J.; and + red ore (decomposed magnetite), from Chester, N. J. The fuel was 7/8 Lehigh anthracite and + Connellsville coke, and the limestone a dolomite from Andover, N. J. The resulting iron varied in silicon from 0 84 per cent. in No. 1 foundry to 0.51 per cent. in gray forge; in phosphorus, from 0.81 per cent. to 0.55 per cent.; sulphur, 0.035 per cent.; manganese, 0.375 per cent. It was highly "chilling" in its properties, and very strong. In running, it invariably appeared to be of a lower grade than it really was; the higher grades scintillating as much as hard iron usually does. After getting into the moulds, and beginning to cool, a black crust began to show itself, seeming to exude from the pigs, till finally, when the iron was cold enough to break, it completely covered the face of the pigs. At this time it was dense black, but after some exposure to the air it ac .

Jan 1, 1884

By Martin A. Moyers

THE nation's effort to win the war speedily is reflected in current trends in coal utilization, as in all other fields of our lives. In all industries, wherever coal is used for the production of heat and power the emphasis is on getting the most useful result with the least expenditure of matt.ria1. In addition to carrying its own share of the load, increased as it is by the demands of war industry, coal has had to fill in for the other fuels, mainly petroleum products, whose distribution from their more distant sources has been crippled by lack of shipping. Thus, the outstanding note in the utilization of coal this year is not the development of new methods of burning or handling coal but the extraordinary job that the industry has done in producing enough coal to serve all needs.

Jan 1, 1943

By Frank Rieber

EVERYONE is familiar with the story of the poor Indian and his leaking tepee. He couldn't repair the leak while it was raining, naturally. And when it wasn't raining, where was the incentive? Even if this traditional Indian was apochryphal, his counterparts are certainly alive today, and operating on a world-wide scale. - A recent issue of the Wall Street Journal, for example, carried an impassioned letter from an old cocoa planter, who wants the world to know why the price of cocoa has gone skyrocketing. For years, he says, British and American interests have bought cocoa at the cheapest possible price and, incidentally, from growers willing to sell at that price. Between them, they didn't put enough money back into the business, either to fight disease in the cocoa groves or to plant new cocoa trees. Until new trees are planted and come into bearing, we will be paying exorbitant prices for our cocoa, and getting less of it.

Jan 1, 1948

"The greatest mining center in the state of Utah is the incorporated town of Bingham about twenty-five miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The principal industry of this vicinity, prior to the early fall of 1 863, was lumbering and the first saw-mill in the state was built near the mouth of Bingham Canyon. Early in the fall of that year, George B. Ogilvie discovered gold and shortly afterward the first mining district in the state was organized. Some writers place the discovery of gold in the canyon in the late fifties. If this be so, however, the matter was kept extremely quiet because no mining was engaged in until after Ogilvie's discovery.Bingham was a placer mining camp, producing about one million dollars' worth of dust and nuggets from placers up and down the canyon and in Bear Gulch until early in the seventies, or about ten years after the discovery of gold, when a large body of argentiferous lead ore was discovered and soon after heavy shipments were made from a half dozen or more properties.In 1 8 74, A. H. and George L. Bemis erected the first concentrating plant in the state for the treatment of sulphide lead ores.The history of the camp as a producer of copper begins in the summer of 1 88 7, when Enos A. Wall noticed, in observing prospecting drifts and inclines driven some years before, the discoloration caused by the coppery solution. As a large part of the adjacent ground had been abandoned, he located two claims, which he called the ""Dick Mackintosh"" and the ""Charles Reid,"" after two of his friends.Late in 1896, the Highland Boy Mine produced sulphide ore rich in copper, causing a revival of interest in the copper potentialities of the camp, and during the next seven years a number of new claims were located ."

Jan 1, 1925

By Lovell Lawrence

MAGNETITE deposits in the Eastern States have been mined uninterruptedly since pre-Revolutionary War days. The industry, thriving in normal times, was given impetus in all periods of tumult, and continued to advance and expand, until the Lake Superior ores came into production. A period of comparative quiet existed until increased freight rates, together with increased mining costs on Lake Region ores, permitted the magnetites again to compete. This, coupled with World War demands, created unpre¬cedented activity. Producing plants were at their peak, new mines were equipped and put in operation and the industry pushed production beyond the absorption point. Ore stocks were tremendous, internal competition severe, and a great increase in import of European ores brought the industry to a low ebb in 1923.

Jan 1, 1933

By J. Mizrahi, A. Brillantshtein, A. Mitzmager, O. Schächter

The separation of synthetic mixtures of heavy minerals by hindered settling classification and jigging was comparatively tested in water and five organic heavy liquids, of various specific gravities and viscosities. It was found that in the hindered settling classification process the separation efficiency was directly proportional to the concentration criterion, the liquid viscosity being a minor factor. There is therefore a decisive advantage in using heavy liquids as classification medium. In the jigging process the advantage of using a heavy liquid is masked by the detrimental effect of a higher liquid viscosity, which, in this case constitutes an important factor. Considerable interest has been aroused lately by the development of mineral beneficiation techniques 1,2 using TBE (tetrabromoethane), a heavy liquid of specific gravity of 2.96, which has been made available for industrial use by a new process3 producing TBE directly from the Dead Sea brines at a reasonable price. Most of the applications investigated until now were based on the sink-float separation of minerals in a heavy liquid of intermediate specific gravity. The TBE can be conveniently diluted with many organic solvents, and thus sharp separations are possible in a wide range of specific gravities up to 2.96. Although this maximum specific gravity is sufficient on most cases for the elimination of the bulk of the barren gangue and the production of marketable concentrates, some practical problems came up for investigation in which the separation of two (or more) minerals, heavier than TBE, was required.* *Among the cases studied in the IMI Laboratorles which fall into this category we can mention: alluvial deposits, such as heavy minerals in sea sand, tin deposits, or ground coarse-grained rocks, such as pegmatites. In such cases where, due to the petrographic structure, further fine grinding is required in order to achieve the liberation of the heavy components, the

Jan 1, 1964

By R. G. Woolery

INTRODUCTION Since 1975, Union Carbide Corporation has been conducting uranium exploration in southwestern South Dakota. This program has resulted in the discovery of an ore body about eight miles north of Edgemont in Fall River County. The site which was previously mined for uranium in the 1950's and 1960's consists of 950 lode claims (approximately 20,000 acres) and is within the Black Hills National Forest. Preliminary development plans indicate that fewer than 200 surface acres will be involved in the mining and heap leaching of the ore. The ore occurs in both the Fall River and Lakota formations. The exploration to date has developed something in excess of two million tons of ore averaging -0.1% U308. About 75% of the ore is expected to be mined from underground with 25% coming from five to seven small pits. The surface mining will be extensions of previously mined areas with a disturbance of 35-40 new acres near 35-40 previously disturbed acres requiring a total reclamation of 70-80 acres. Several options for processing the ore including conventional milling by UCC, conventional milling in joint venture with another producer, and heap leaching are under consideration. This paper is concerned with the preliminary assessment of the heap leaching option based on the limited test work conducted on surface samples and on available cores from the deeper ones. The final design for a commercial operation will not be available until an underground bulk sample has been obtained and evaluated. Union Carbide has been operating heap leach facilities commercially since 1973 at Gas Hills, Wyoming and Maybell, Colorado. During this period, we have made considerable progress in heap construction

Jan 1, 1983

By AIME

THE wind howls almost incessantly over the mining engineers working in the near desert that is the Division of Namaqualand, the upper Atlantic coastal corner of South Africa's Cape of Good Hope Province. But when these men at the U. S.-owned mines called Nababeep South and East O'okiep (pronounced Oh-keep) tell you about their achievements, they can be heard above the wind. For their O'okiep Copper Co. Ltd. now produces over half the Union of South Africa's annual output of 30,000 tons of copper metal. Moreover, it is a very decent sample of U. S. geotechnical imagination. financial daring, and managerial skill, all operating successfully in a

Jan 1, 1947

By Sherwin F. Kelly

THOUGH the Geophysics Commit- tee limited itself to two sessions this year, both of them marked by a high percentage of absentee authors, even this situation failed to dampen the and or of the ebullient geophysicists, who bandied no small amount of good- humoredlv barbed discussion. Hans Lundherg offered some constructive criticism of last year's report by the Geophysics Education Commit- tee, making a plea for more training in field techniques and less insistence on rigorous theoretical training. Carl Heiland pointed out the necessity of making geophysics and geology courses more attractive in order to draw more students into these fields. Exception was taken to this line of reasoning by Father Macelwane and Sherwin F. Kelly who emphasized the necessity for sound basic training if competent geophysicists were to be turned out. This discussion developed apropos of the report of the Geophysics Education Committee, which had been postponed from the Education Division meetings, but was not read as it was available in mimeographed form. Except for this diversion the morning program fol-

Jan 1, 1944

By A. C. Butterworth

M OST operators of open-pit mines in the Lake Superior iron ore district are quite familiar with the use of fuel oil in the heavy-duty Diesel engines commonly used in truck-haulage service but some operators, including my own company, Pickands Mather, have had butane-engine trucks in service for several years, and less is known of their operation. One of the first installations of trucks for iron-ore haulage was in 1939 at a deep open-pit mine on the Cuyuna Range. These superseded standard-gauge steam haulage. Trucks then obtainable were equipped with 150-hp Diesel engines, and the speed of these units on an 8 % grade would have been so slow, considering the depth of the pit, that plans for an all-truck haul out of the pit were rejected. About this time one of the engine manufacturers brought out an auto-

Jan 1, 1948

By Clyde Williams

A MAN who is a first-class metallurgist, engineer, and scientist and an outstanding organizer, administrator, and executive and who, at the same time, has an innate ability to "make friends and influence people" everywhere he goes is an exceptional personality at any time. And if such an individual can retain this combination of virtues during a great war despite the fact that the Government loaded him with enough work and responsibility for three such men. he is a most exceptional personality. And if he can keep his head and maintain an unfailing sense of humor during the trying war years and, while dealing with hundreds of jittery metallurgists and metalworkers, with Army and Navy brass, and with red-tape-entangled war agencies by the dozen, he is a rare personality indeed. Such a man is Clyde Williams, director of Battelle Memorial Institute. who will be President of AIME in 1947. The Institute is fortunate in having him as its mentor during what may be a critical and important year.

Jan 1, 1947

By T. Fraser, R. L. Sutherland

Under a cooperative agreement between United States Bureau of Mines and the Truax-Traer Coal Company, some operating-scale experiments have been made with the cyclone thickener in the preparation plant of the Shamrock No. 1 mine at Kayford, West Virginia. These tests were made with a 14-in. cyclone of the type developed by the Dutch State Mines in Limburg. It was applied experimentally to the thickening of solids in washery water to obtain performance data to show the range of sizes that may be recovered and other operating characteristics that would indicate the field of usefulness of this device in coal preparation practice. This is a progress report only. It covers results obtained in a series of 17 tests of the operation of what has been considered a unit of commercial size operating on suspensions of fine coal mixed with a relatively small amount of freeimpurities. The underflow material, after further dewatering in centrifuges, is a marketable grade of coal.

Jan 1, 1949

By John B. Hastings

TEN miles from Hartsel, near Antelope springs, in Park county, Colorado, there is a large area of unconsolidated lake beds, which are interesting because at least a part of the lacustrine sands contains in the aggregate an immense amount of gold. During 1906, one of the arms of this dessicated lake was fairly well prospected with shafts and cuts by an Eastern company to test its value, as favorable amounts of gold had in some instances been found upon it. The claims of the company contain about 5,000 acres of the beds; but this is only a small portion of them, a south branch from a main body, which is at least 7 miles in diameter, with other and very wide lateral gulches, paralleling the one herein described on the east and west. A certain amount of digging and sampling was done in the outside areas; but the result was evidently unsatisfactory, since the work was discontinued. his section of Colorado has not been studied geologically, and the age of the ancient lake is unknown. It is probably Quaternary. I spent two weeks on the ground, in September and October, 1906, but was quite absorbed in the sampling. I looked, however, for terraces on the rim-rock and other evidences of movement and erosion, but did not find anything to denote an earlier age than the Quaternary. The granite rim-rock may be Archean; S. F. Emmons says that some of the granites in central Colorado are as old as that. The rim-rock as observed is a gray quartzose biotite-granite, except a small area in Sections 3 and 34, where it is a felsitic (?) breccia. The breccia is silicified by solfataric action at the corner near Shaft No. 7, in Section 34; but this action is older than the sands and does not extend to them. The shaft averaged 50c. per ton, more than twice as much as the rest.

Jan 5, 1908