FLSmidth, together with several partners, has been awarded a 2020 Horizon grant (EUR 1.4 million in total, EUR 740,000 to FLSmidth) that will allow its Mining Flotation team to enhance its fundamental knowledge of flotation technology through the help of five PhD students and world-class flotation scientists.
In recent years, FLSmidth has participated in targeted collaborations with universities that have process knowledge and capability relevant to its business. Last year, it was approached to be the leading industrial partner in an application for EU funded research project with the aim of conducting research to advance its knowledge and understanding of flotation in mining while benchmarking various flotation technologies to each other.
The company states: “Flotation is extremely complex and requires a great deal of understanding in mechanical, process and metallurgical challenges. Since it is a key process area with impacts on upstream comminution and downstream dewatering, there is huge potential to save energy and resources through the innovations in refining flotation process technology.”
Helmholtz Center Dresden Rossendorf (HZDR) and FLSmidth proposed a project named “FlotSim” with the goal of drastically improving the recovery rates of flotation through fundamental flotation analysis and comparing the industrial state-of-the-art technologies to each other.
This fundamental research, along with strong internal R&D efforts, will advance FLSmidth’s existing and developing flotation products including forced air nextSTEP™, naturally aspirated WEMCO®, fast flotation REFLUX (RFC™) and coarse particle coarseAIR™ flotation cells. In addition to furthering fundamental understanding, these efforts will allow for improved simulation models allowing optimised equipment selection and flowsheet design.
Improved next generation flotation processes are mandatory to remain economically competitive and to respond to sustainable mining for future generations. The FlotSim collaboration with industry and university partners, along with recruitment of five early stage PhD research candidates will address some of these important societal challenges.
“The researchers will each spend between three-six months working alongside our flotation experts in Salt Lake City to bolster our understanding and knowledge base. They will jointly investigate and model the flotation processes with its complex interactions between valuable mineral particles, gas bubbles, and turbulent flow, addressing phenomena from the nanoscale to the scale of pilot machines, with focus on traditional and novel flotation techniques.”