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By D. Pearcey, S. T. Vessey, V. Hegde, J. Staples

"Pellet quality has taken on a new dimension during the last ten years. Quality in the seventies was generally defined as adherence to certain physical and chemical specifications. Today, the talk is in terms of how the business is managed, how customer's expectations can be exceeded, not only in product quality, but in service responsiveness.Coke breeze and flux additions, lower silica levels, and improved furnace control practices have all contributed to the improvement of pellet physical and metallurgical properties. Statistical process control has provided additional insight into the parameters that affect pellet quality.Increased customer contact and product quality surveys have heightened our awareness of customer needs and also provide direction for quality improvement test work. Current work is focussed on improving reducibility and understanding the relationship between tumble, fired compression and metallurgical properties.This paper will review the Iron Ore Company of Canada's efforts during the past decade and describe some of its initiatives for the future.IntroductionThe Carol Pellet PlantThe Iron Ore Company of Canada's Carol Project is located in Labrador City in the southwestern portion of Newfoundland and Labrador , approximately 965 Ian northeast of Montreal. The project consists of mining facilities, beneficiation complex and a pellet plant, which began operations in 1962. The pellet plant consists of six Dravo-Lurgi straight grate machines, regrinding, filtering and balling facilities. The current capacity of the Carol pellet plant is approximately 10.5 million tonnes , while the concentrator has the capacity to produce about 18 million tonnes of concentrate.The orebody consists of specular hematite, magnetite and small quantities of limonite and goethite. The average grade of the orebody is approximately 39% iron."

Jan 1, 1991

By H. R. Hammond, E. Sadar

Cominco is making substantial savings in secondary breaking by replacing dynamite with a new nitrate-based explosive. Compareo with dynamite. the new explosive, known locally as "Fine NCN," is significantly cheaper, more effective and safer to use. It also works better than prilled NCN, which is unsatisfactory for secondary blasting because of inadequate sensitivity, low strength and awkward handling properties. A simple apparatus has been devised for pulverizing prilled NCN to a fineness practical for effective secondary breaking. Blasting systems using cheap detonating cord for initiation have been developed.

Jan 1, 1966

By S. Jain

Construction industry is considered as labour intensive, having shortage of skilled labour, unsafe with large number of industrial accidents. Construction industry requires high technology automation products (Robots) for improving productivity, safety, quality etc. Robots are developed by various countries in different areas like demolition, earthwork, bridge, tunnels, road work, underwater works, trenches and piping, maintenance etc. however they are still not used to their full potential by construction industry. Hence in this paper, the authors propose a ?model for adoption? of robots in construction industry. This model considers how a construction firm will adopt full scale robots like manually controlled machine, tele-controlled machines, computer controlled machines and cognitive robots and assimilate them through various stages.

Aug 1, 2013

By J. Zachwieja

As part of a general review on study of surfactant blinding agents to improve gold recovery during cyanide leaching of carbonaceous gold ores, processes of CIL and RIL leaching using surfactants were investigated. When refractory ores were treated by surfactants, CIL and RIL leaching processes yielded significant improvement on gold recovery. This paper will discuss and compare the laboratory results from two different leaching processes on preg-robbing ores, as well as, illustrate the difference of potential fouling of the blinding agents on activated carbon and resins.

Jan 1, 2015

Cansolv® S02 Scrubbing Technology was described in a paper in Copper/Cobre 03. Four years on, the technology is operating at a full scale production facility.Hindustan Zinc Limited expanded their capacity by installing the AUSMELT process. The process proceeds through smelting, slag reduction, slag cleaning and holding stages sequentially in the same vessel, resulting in widely varying off gas characteristics. The off gas is suitable for treatment is a conventional acid plant for a modest proportion of the day, but at other times produces off gas too high in S02 to be discharged to atmosphere. Cansolv® S02 Scrubbing Technology was identified as a means of effectively removing the S02 down to low levels from the off gas during all stages of the pyrometallurgical process. Furthermore, the Cansolv® S02 Scrubbing System Technology produces high purity S02 that allowed for the captured S02 to be directed to an existing acid plant, avoiding the capital cost of new acid making capacity.

Jan 1, 2007

By John Postle, Maureen Jensen, Marcel Vallee, Bernie Haystead, Dan Hora, Graham Clow

The Committee's proposed standards establish definitions and guidelines for the reporting of Exploration Information, Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves in Canada and are identified as the "CIM Standards" and referred to as such hereafter in this document. To provide additional clarification to Qualified Persons (QPs), guidelines have been included with the respective definitions. The CIM Standards are applicable to all minerals including industrial minerals, diamonds and other gemstones. Reserve definitions for bitumen, natural gas and oil are not included in these Standards. The CIM Standards are not intended to cover mineral inventory estimates that will be reported to government agencies.

Jan 1, 2001

By Baochun Wang, Hongli Jia, Zhaolian Wang, Fengliang Liu

"Promote and apply a new beneficiation technology and equipment effectively processing the refractory and medium-fine grained weak-magnetic minerals. HUATE® Forced-oil Cooling Vertical Ring WHIMS adopts the transformer oil cooling technology to cool excitation coils, solving the easily generated scaling problem resulting from water cooling, thereby to eliminate the demineralized water system. With <25 temperature ?raise, its magnetic field is stable. Wrapped by outer magnetic armor, it can generate a background intensity 1360kA/m. It effects very well in 1) wet preseparating the weak-magnetic coarse grains, like hematite, manganese ore, ilmenite, and purifying the concentrate; 2) removing the ferrous impurities and purifying the non-metallic minerals, like quartz, feldspar, kaolin; 3) enriching and recovering tailings from non-ferrous metals, like copper, lead, cobalt, molybdenum, thereby to greatly improve the mine resource utilization. It has applied 14 relative patents in China, and the invention patent in 56 countries, like Russia, USA, Australia, via PCT international organization. HUATE® WHIMS has been applied and accepted in more than 100 mines in and out of China. Compared with water cooling vertical ring WHIMS, it’s energy-saving and water-saving, and avoiding generating the scale. While compared with JONES WHIMS under the same separation indexes, it’s featured of more space-effective, lighter, lower costs, higher gradient, higher efficiency, larger processing capacity and wider grain application scope. Greatly promoting development of mineral processing technologies, HUATE® WHIMS is the equipment to reduce costs and improve efficiency urgently needed by the mine enterprises now.INTRODUCTIONAt present, influenced by the price and production factors, the international market demand for the grade of iron ores is increasing continuously. Restricted by the ore occurrence state, the beneficiation technology level and product economic value, every year the stope strips the stockpiling and discards hundreds of millions of tons of waste rocks containing iron, especially the weak magnetic hematite and limonite with <20% Fe%. The utilization technological bottleneck of these waste rocks makes their concentration ratio as high as 5-6, which leads to the huge wastes of energy, materials and beneficiation reagents and the increase of production costs. The effective solution is to improve the selected Fe% of the waste rocks like hematite. With the successful application of HPGR technologies in Chinese large iron mines, the mill feeding size has been reduced to 6-0 mm or 3-0 mm from the original 15-0 mm in the crushing system with 3 stages of crushing and 1 stage of closed circuit. This creates the conditions for the wet separation and recovery. While for the medium-fine grained weak-magnetic minerals, it lacks of the effective separation and recovery equipment in the world, which’s badly in need of R&D of the medium-fine grained high gradient wet strong magnetic preseparation equipment."

Jan 1, 2016

By M. Somppi, Z. Yamak

"Gold producers invest significant effort in mining, processing, and creating an intermediate gold doré product. Nonetheless, equal effort should be extended to the final handling and processing of the doré bar, and managing the high-purity gold produced at the fine-gold toll refiner. This detailed attention to bullion handling and refining provides rigor and confidence that the mine site is achieving, through fair and controlled methodology, the most appropriate value for the final product. With the above in mind, the following study explores the importance of preparing a set of site best-practices for bullion handling and specifically, detailing the peculiarities of sampling methodologies and the impact on assays.INTRODUCTION Gold and silver handling practices are common place at mine sites and refineries. The practices include but are not limited to smelting, ingot casting, weighing practices, and secure transportation. Proper handling and processing of the bullion material ensures that the mine site is achieving the true value of the final product. Various handling aspects can critically impact the perceived value of the bullion. A few of these particulars include weight tracking, scale recertification and calibration, refining and melting practices, melt temperature measurement, sampling, pouring, bar cleaning, furnace technology and crucible selection, and assaying. Nevertheless, this report discusses and focuses on the importance of proper sampling and molten-metal temperature measurement and their potential impact on the final doré bar value. Refining or re-melting operations achieve a proper measure of the precious metal content of its bullion when the sample accurately represents the whole bar. At first this task appears seemly straightforward, however, taking a representative sample can be challenging and is also one of the most important tasks for valuing gold during the settlement stage at the precious metal refinery. Various bullion sampling methodologies exist; including: dip sampling, granulation, drilling, cutting, and vacuum pin sampling. The Royal Canadian Mint (2009) indicated in their technical review of refinery operations that pin sampling is one of the best methods for cases where representative sampling and accuracy are required, e.g. to determine the payable metal content. Pin sampling consists of inserting a sealed glass vacuum tube (Figure 1) into the molten metal; when the molten metal contacts a purposely-designed weak portion of the glass, the seal breaks and the metal is suctioned into the hollow centre (Figure 2)."

Jan 1, 2018

By F. P. Hassani, Jacque Ouellet, M. Hossein

A laboratory investigation was undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of different binding agents in a paste backfilling operation suitable to be used in a sulphide-rich environment. Different combinations of Portland cement and fly ash type C as well as ferrous slag were used as the binding agents. The unconfined compressive strength of the samples was measured for extended curing periods. The results indicate that the addition of 3% slag in the binding agent mix could produce strengths up to 0.5 MPa in the samples under investigation. For higher binding contents, the addition of Portland cement will lead to higher availability of calcium hydroxide and calcium aluminate, which are susceptible to deterioration from the phenomenon known as sulphate attack. Using slag, on the other hand, will reduce the permeability, availability of calcium hydroxide, and dilute the calcium aluminate ions reducing the susceptibility of the samples to sulphate attack. However, gypsum will form which could have the same detrimental effect on the strength of the treated matrix. Therefore, special attention must be given to the content and properties of agents used to activate the pozzolanic properties of the slag.

Jan 1, 2001

By R. Esteban, D. Runnels, J. Torrealba-Vargas, G. Couture

"Data handling is an important step in the development of a simulator of a mineral processing circuit. The model requires representative data of the scenario to be modeled. The model development involves protocols that must be followed very closely to complete a successful project.Data handling of large and diverse datasets (metallurgical test results, geological data, mining models, historical data, etc.) is a key element of the model. The information needs to be processed, reconciled, interpreted, modeled and presented to support the design or the optimization of a mineral processing plant.Best practice recommends that teams from different disciplines (such as mining, metallurgy, geology and environmental) interact to define the most important variables that could influence the simulator. For example by adopting a geometallurgical approach in the earlier stages of the project, it is possible to consolidate the number of main ore rock types in a testwork program (saving money and time) by involving geologists and metallurgists in the sample selection and data interpretation.Planning the development of a model involves an understanding of the software capabilities but also the limitations and the magnitude of the data required to calibrate the model in case of changes in the project.A successful model requires a deep understanding of the circuit to be modeled and thus plant personnel should be considered as members of the team.This paper describes the use of the "state of the art" tools for data analysis, simulation and optimization; and shows three practical examples of the use those tools in the design of mineral processing plants."

Jan 1, 2015

By M. Beech-Jones

The increased emphasis on the efficient utilization of capital and mineral resources has led to several new advances in the science of mineral separation. One example of a recent development is the application of high-capacity high-intensity wet magnetic separators to fine hematit e recovery by a leading Canadian iron ore producer. The iron ore recovery feasibilit , flow-sheet development, circuit operation and metallurgical performance are reviewed.

Jan 1, 1979

By T. V. Nethery

Introduction A brief account of the East Malartic fire is essential if this paper is to serve the purpose implied by its title. The fire originated in the timbers of No. 4 shaft at the 10th, or 1,570-foot, level; this was the top or collar of the underground sinking operations. At the time, sinking was in progress and the shaft bottom was 242 feet below the 12th station horizon, or 618 feet &apos;below the l0th level. Above the l0th level, the shaft was not in use as the surface plant was not yet completed. The shaft crews descended from surface in No. 3 vertical shaft to the l0th level, where they transferred to No. 4 shaft, a distance of 1,450 feet. Of the sixteen shaftmen mucking at the shaft bottom, four were able to reach safety. One shaftman was overcome by fumes midway between the two shafts on the l0th level, while attempting his escape. The remaining eleven men climbed as far as the 11th station and there succumbed to carbon monoxide. No. 4 shaft, inclined at 61 degrees, bad been raised and timbered from the 10th level to surface; this bad been followed by sinking operations below the l0th. Two air hoists had been set up in the footwall of the shaft, 110 feet above the 10th level, and directly behind compartments No. 2 and No. 4. The waste from the shaft bottom was hoisted in 28-cubicfoot buckets on mono rails and dumped over standard shaft sinking doors into waste chutes built into No. 1 and No. 3 compartments. The five-compartment shaft, 7 ft. 8 in. by 34 ft. 6 in. overall size, was heavily timbered. In addition to the standard shaft timbers of 8 in. by 8 in. and 8 in. by 10 in. B.C. fir, the hanging-wall and ends of the shaft were laced with 4-inch spruce lagging. This represented approximately 300 board feet of timber in placee for every foot of shaft. The cause of the fire bas never been determined, despite every effort to do so. The inquest held for those who lost their lives in the fire was an extremely thorough one, but only the location of the origin, and not the cause, was established.

Jan 1, 1950

By Jamie N. Burdeski, Susan E. Hartfield-Wünsch

Aluminum sheet use has been steadily increasing in the automotive industry to achieve mass reduction and improve fuel economy. One significant manufacturing challenge for aluminum sheet implementation is the reduced formability compared to the steel alloys it replaces. This paper includes friction results from the draw bead simulator (DBS), twist compression (TCT) and strip draw (SDT) tests, for two oil based lubricants and four hot melt lubricants. Formability testing was done with the same lubricants and materials, testing in pure stretch with a hemispherical punch, and in draw with a breadpan shaped die.

Jan 1, 2015

By Pura Alfonso, Teresa Escobet, Hernan Anticoi, Eduard Guasch, Josep Oliva, Sarbast A. Hamid

"The liberation modelling of mineral particles using mineral liberation analysis have been used in the past to model comminution and concentration processes. In this work this concept has been taken a little further, using comminution and concentration for applying the mineralogical characteristics of particles. This approach is shown using the image analysis, mineral liberation analysis and the distribution density functions for liberation modelling. The work focused on the effect of comminution on mineral liberation for liberation modelling. To model this, effect the mineral liberation of the particles using distribution density and the cumulative distribution was linked to the image analysis of the ore particles. These properties have been estimated by statistical measures such as the distribution density and liberation grade, which were extracted from MLA data and images analysis, using proper image analysis and techniques based on MATLAB software. A comparison of different tungsten ores of liberated particles, has been introduced and evaluated by estimated results and image analysis.INTRODUCTION The chief economic minerals of tungsten are wolframite [(Fe,Mn) WO4] and scheelite(CaWO4), and approximately two-thirds of the world tungsten reserves consist of scheelite deposits (Lassner and Schubert, 1999). Tungsten has unique properties and is widely used in various industrial high strength and high temperature applications. It occurs coarsely aggregated in low grade ores. Most of tungsten ores, particularly scheelite, wolframite and ferberite, occur in deposits with very low content of WO3 (0.1–2.5%) that is not economically viable to apply directly metallurgical methods to extract tungsten (Martins, 2014). Tungsten is considered as a critical metal by the European Union by the economic importance and also the high supply risk (European Commission, 2014; Chakhmouradian et al., 2015).Currently, scheelite is playing an increasingly important role in tungsten industry because the mineral reserve of wolframite is getting depleted after gradual exploitation and utilization (Min et al., 2016). In mineral processing, the liberation of valuable mineral from the gangue determines the efficiency of subsequent separation processes. The liberation characteristics of an ore are primarily dependent on its texture, the association of mineral in the host matrix of gangue minerals, and to some extent on the grinding process (Zhang and Subasinghe; 2013)."

Jan 1, 2017

By Desmond Y. M. Lee

This paper presents a procedure to prepare input for the computerized pit design system at Iron Ore Company of Canada. The procedure is simple and requires very little training. Also, it is general enough to accept both bench (horizontal cross section) maps and section (vertical cross section) maps. The output of this procedure is data which represent blocks of ore and waste with dollar values based on mineral content. The ultimate pit design is presented in printer-generated graphs, with numbers indicating the depths of pit bottom walls. Roads are added manually by the engineer with the aid of other computer programs. Section maps and bench maps are also printed as part of the output of the ultimate pit design.

Jan 1, 1978

By Arthur M. Whiteside

Discussion of the laws bearing upon the economics of mining in this province at once resolves itself under three headings: (a) The rights and obligations of holders of mineral bearing lands; (b) Taxation of mines; (c) Regulation of methods adopted in financing mining operations. Titles: The law relating to titles is contained in the Mineral Act, Placer Mining Act and Coal Mines Prospecting Act. Origin: Mining laws in force in this province and elsewhere on the continent had their origin in the rule-of-thumb regulations adopted by prospectors themselves, when, far from the centres of civilization and the seats of the courts of justice, they found it necessary, for mutual protection, to fix the conditions of possession by right of location, and to prescribe the duties to be performed in order to enable the individual to maintain his ground against all comers. These regulations have been codified and added to by legislatures, until we find adequate protection and safeguard to property in the laws of this province.

Jan 1, 1924

By L Tafaghodi Khajavi, M. Barati

The distribution of phosphorus between solid silicon and iron-silicon melt was determined to investigate the degree of phosphorus removal from silicon by solvent refining with iron-silicon alloys. The distribution coefficient which is the ratio of the mole fraction of phosphorus in solid to that of liquid is as follows: 0.22±0.02 (1310°C), 0.29±0.02 (1260°C) and 0.33±0.02 (1210°C). The removal percentage of phosphorus is: 84.2% (1310°C), 72.5% (1260°C), and 63.7% (1210°C). The average phosphorus content of produced silicon in the proposed solvent refining process would be over two times less than that of the conventional directional solidification. The values of interaction coefficient of phosphorus on iron at different temperatures were obtained as -3460±155 (1310°C), -3595±159 (1260°C) and -3694±119 (1210°C). Self interaction parameter of phosphorus at different temperatures are as follows: 68±4 (1310 ?C), 78±10 (1260 ?C) and 103±19 (1210 ?C). The calculated values for distribution coefficient of phosphorus at infinite dilution are: 0.22±0.00 (1310°C), 0.30±0.00 (1260°C) and 0.34±0.00 (1210 °C).

Jan 1, 2015

By D. F. Sangster

"Eight volcanogenic massive sulphide districts in Canada and Japan, ranging in age from Archean to Miocene, were selected for analysis. The study revealed that: {I) each district has an average diameter of 32 km; (2) the districts contain 4 to 20 deposits each, with an average of /2 deposits; (3) the average total base metal content per district is 4.6 million tonnes, with a coefficient of variation of32%; (4) ranked in order of size, the largest deposit in each district contains, on average, 67% of the total metal and the second largest about 13 %. The remaining deposits range downward in decreasing proportions. Empirical observations such as these may be used f or evaluating the undiscovered potential of new districts as well as contributing to a better understanding of the distribution and genesis of this important class of base metal deposits. Previous WorkThe characteristic geological features o f volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits have been described by numerous authors over the past fifteen years and it is now widely accepted that these deposits comprise a major ""deposit-type."" In addition to these geological parameters, however, it is now becoming apparent that volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits show several distinctive grade-tonnage relationships. For example, Singer et al. (1975) demonstrated a slight negative correlation between copper grade and ore tonnage in their sampling of 146 volcanogenic deposits. In a study of 110 Canadian Precambrian deposits of this type, Boldy (1977) showed that the size of the modal deposit is 0.39 million tons, that of the median deposit is 1.40 million tons and the arithmetic average is 6.85 million tons. Moreover, Boldy&apos;s data show that the average grade of combined base metals (Cu + Zn + Pb) for each of the se three deposit-sizes is, respectively, 6.25%, 5.35% and 6.47%. Because the lead content of Canadian Precambrian volcanogeni c deposits is most frequently less than 1%, the total metal grade is effectively Cu + Zn . From Figure 2 in Bold y (1977), it can be seen that 83% of the deposits fall in the range of 0.l to 10 million tons ."

Jan 1, 1980

By John A. C. Fortescue

Details of the interactions between the environment and the growth of terrestrial plants may be complex and difficult to study. This paper focusses attention on some of these complexities by means of six examples, each of which provides information on an aspect of the interaction between the growth rate of plants and the chemistry of the environment. The relationships which exist between the information obtained from these examples and the concepts of "holism" and "transfer rate problems" are pointed out and the importance of long-term biog•eochemical studies in Canadian environments is stressed.

Jan 1, 1971

By I. Thobadi, C. Pawlik, K. Bisaka, S. Mokoena, M. Erwee

The PyEarth™ process developed at Mintek has been demonstrated successfully at pilot scale. Nine tons of ore containing 2.3 mass % of total rare earth oxides (TREO) from a dormant mineralogically complex iron-rich ore deposit, was subjected to a concentrating smelting step in a 200 kW DC open-arc pilot furnace and the rare earths from the resulting slag were extracted via a hydrometallurgical route. This ore deposit is practically not amenable to extraction by conventional methods. The testwork results proved that the PyEarth™ process was able to optimize the extraction of rare earths while minimizing waste through the removal of iron as a saleable iron alloy. Reduction of iron to the alloy in the smelting step was found flexible, efficient, and controllable, while rare earths were left virtually unreduced in the slag phase. The slag chemistry is selected to optimize both the smelting and leaching performances as well as the alloy composition. Leaching of the resulting slag was found possible and most efficient in hydrochloric acid amongst other lixiviants tested.

Jan 1, 2017