With just over a month to go before the cutoff date at the end of July, the following are the 2015 nominations to be inducted into the International Mining Technology Hall of Fame at the gala dinner in Phoenix (Hyatt downtown) on February 22, during SME Annual Conference week. Email [email protected] for further nominations and for enquiries about sponsorship.
Bulk Handling
Francisco Castaño Jr and Sr –– father and son who did so much for bulk storage innovations using dome technology,
John Finlay –– a father of mobile crushing and screening equipment.
Dick Stahura, Martin Engineering, recognised around the world as the the leading expert on controlling carryback, dust, and spillage from belt conveyors.
Comminution
Fred Bond –– Bond Grindability and Bond Work Index. His work on circuit design, from the late 1930s to the mid 1960s, changed the method of design completely.
Elizabeth Lewis-Gray founded CEEC International to provide a centralised repository of data related to eco-efficient comminution and its benefits.
Steve Morrell –– power measurement and prediction for AG/SAG mills incorporated into JKSimMet and developer of the SMC drill core test to estimate the JK A*b parameter.
John Russell –– mill relining systems.
Concentration
Professor Kevin Galvin (inventor) and Taavi Orupold (manufacturer) –– collaborative development of the Reflux™ classifier; coupling the researching of an invention with manufacturing.
The equipment developed by Sandy Gray, Technical Director at Gekko Systems, offers a conceptual platform that maximises mineral recovery by creating a high-grade stream of concentrate from which minerals are extracted by gravity separation, or from which waste is eliminated.
Ernst Joachim (EJ) Holtz –– has played a huge role in the growth of the Multotec group of companies, becoming one of South Africa’s most successful mining service and equipment supply businesses.
Bob Moorhead –– inventive cyclone designs that have made a great contribution to the industry.
Philip Thompson has been a 35+ year leader and innovator in concentrator-related flotation.
Exploration
Dr Wolfgang Baum is a world recognised process mineralogist with over 40 years experience in the mining industry. He pioneered the first commercial installation of QEMSCAN technology in the USA, operating five QEMSCAN systems in Arizona, and 2 at a mine site in Peru. He was the leader of a design and engineering team for the installation of the two of the most advanced robotics preparation and analytical laboratories in the USA. He is an innovator in the integration of mineralogical analyses into geo-metallurgical programs.
Greg Owens and Damien Blyth for the INTERCEPT® Mineral Preservation System (IMPS). This is a cost effective alternative to freezing of core and chip samples. At the same time it protects samples in the field against oxidation before testing, the system provides long-term conservation of samples, preserving their integrity without frozen storage or waxing.
Metallurgy
The technical team at Direct Nickel Ltd (DNi) has made a step change in the processing efficiency of nickel laterite ore, offering a lower cost, safe and environmentally improved alternative to current processes. Bill Drinkard is the inventor of a key component of the DNi Process, the reagent recycle, while Project Manager Graham Brock and Process Engineer Dr Fiona McCarthy lead the development team.
Mining Software
Dr Tony Diering is the pioneer behind Dassault Systèmes’ innovative block-caving GEOVIA PCBC and sub-level caving GEOVIA PCSLC software applications, which are used by the majority of the world’s mines employing these specialised mining methods.
Paul Higgins founded Dingo as a software company in 1991 to support the needs at an Australian Rio Tinto mine to organise and effectively use oil analysis results. Over the years, Dingo’s Trakka® software tool grew into an independent data and work process platform to care for mining machinery around the globe.
Caterpillar’s MineStar development team: Craig Koehrsen, Michael Murphy, Chuck Sahm, Carl Hendricks, Claude Aboujaoude, Jason Gough, Josh Bynon and Chuck Boen. MineStar helps the management of everything from material tracking to sophisticated real-time fleet management, machine health systems, autonomous equipment systems and more. The capability sets—Fleet, Terrain, Detect, Health and Command—can be used in combination or individually to allow operations the flexibility and scalability they need to be more productive, efficient and safe.
Outstanding innovator
Sverker Hartwig has an impressive amount of applied patents, but he will perhaps best be recalled for his ability to build a very competitive organisation, with devoted, inspired and successful coworkers, moving Atlas Copco forward in large steps.
Nick Hazen is President and CEO of Hazen Research, a company that was founded by his father and grandfather in 1961. The company has grown from a single-building laboratory to the largest private metallurgical and processing R&D facility in the USA and serves clients around the world.
Dr Bob Johnson, as a pioneer in the use of computer software for modelling resources, met a need to provide quick turn-around on drafting coal boreholes. He demonstrated true innovation by extending that service into a unique solution for the mining industry with his first company Earth Science Computer Services. He founded Maptek in 1981 to develop mining software that could be operated easily by geologists and mining engineers.
Safety
Greg Baiden, Penguin Automated Systems CEO. In 2015 the company shipped what is thought to be the world’s first hangup assessment and clearing robotic system to Codelco’s Andina mine in Chile. The robot hangup clearance unit features an arm that extends 4.6 m horizontally and 10 m vertically through the throat of a drawbell in a block cave mine. At the end of the arm are a 3D camera, an infrared lighting system, a drill and an explosives loader. The robot scans the inside of the drawbell and creates a virtual map of the hangup.
Optalert’s fatigue detection products have been developed with more than 20 years of research by a team which over the years has developed new methods of measuring eye and eyelid movements. This then led to the world’s first validated scale of drowsiness – the Johns Drowsiness Scale – after Optalert founder and Chief Scientist Dr Murray Johns.
As the Founder and Chairman of British-based Trolex, one of the leading names in hazardous gas detection and environmental condition monitoring, John Pierce-Jones has led the development of a number of systems that have revolutionised mine safety around the world, saving thousands of lives.
Surface mining
Peter Chittleborough, Supervisor of the Mine of The Future™, Autonomous Haulage Deployment team. Over the past five years, Komatsu has pioneered the use of its Autonomous Haulage System (AHS) in large mining operations – with its FrontRunner™ autonomous trucks recently passing a landmark milestone of 330 Mt of material moved. With FrontRunner a full truck fleet can be monitored by a single controller located up to thousands of kilometres away.
Andrew Jessett founded MineWare after creating and commercialising the world’s most advanced dragline monitoring system, Pegasys. He has been actively involved in the advancement of Australia’s dragline and shovel monitoring systems over the last decade including the pioneering Universal Dig and Dump (UDD) dragline technology.
Dr Jonathan Peck was a co-founder and CEO of Aquila Mining System, which was subsequently sold to Caterpillar. In this role he lead the development effort that pioneered the use and development of real-time high precision GPS (HPGPS) guidance products for both blasthole drills and cable shovels in the mid-1990s. These developments set the standards for this technology, which is still in use over 20 years later.
When Motion Metrics International started out in 1999, Dr Shahram Tafazoli led a team of just three engineers whose work developed an advanced vision-based system to monitor shovel bucket teeth, ToothMetrics™. When a broken tooth is detected, the system alerts the equipment operator and the mine is then able to take the appropriate measures to prevent the tooth from reaching the crusher.
Deane Tunaley and Stuart Thomson developed Orica’s VistisTM and VistanTM high energy bulk explosives that allow significant expansion of blast patterns and therefore accelerate the delivery of broken stocks ‘on demand’.
Karl-Axel Stjernström, Kurt Andersson and Jörgen Rodert developed Atlas Copco’s Coprod system, a patented innovation, which provides an important increase in drilling productivity for large hole sizes. It allows for fast, straight drilling – a system that combines the high penetration rates of tophammer drilling with the hole straightness and the hole quality of DTH drilling.
Underground development
Borys Chylinski explains that the Skorpion rock drill jumbo is a “light vehicle designed to fit through narrow drifts and spaces that some of the larger equipment cannot navigate. This rig would be best suited in narrow vein mining, startups and mines that function on a tight budget. My hope is that it entices large companies to invest into technologies that can be sold at an affordable rate to make the industry safer in all parts of the world.”
James Robbins has been instrumental in the history of mining, being ultimately responsible both for the hard rock tunnel boring machine (TBM) and the raise boring machine.
John Wood is a man of vision. Back in the early 1980s when a plethora of manufacturers in Australia dabbled in the production of roof bolters for the underground coal mining industry, he and his team came up with a bold new concept – a roof bolter design which took the industry by storm.
Morris Medd has an extensive background spanning over 45 years of mine contracting and development. Most recently Medd was the President of the Redpath Group of Companies, a world leader in shaft sinking, underground mine development and contract mining. He has been credited with the establishment of a number of new and innovative mine development techniques and is considered to be an expert in the field of shaft sinking.
Underground production
Donald Brisebois, Jean-Yves Therien, Andre Savard, John Stella and Ken K.J Onoda-Song. Rocmec technology uses heat to break up a narrow corridor of rock without damaging the waste walls. Therien, VP Development, Rocmec Mining says “most often narrow-vein ore bodies are prohibitively expensive to mine therefore many producing mines will not extract veins that are under 1 m in width unless they are very high grade. The conventional long-hole method of drilling and blasting produces about 6 t of waste for every tonne of the sought-after mineral extracted with our technology.”
Hermann Paus founded the company Hermann Paus Maschinenfabrik in 1968. Since 1974, the company has been designing and producing machines for mining. The first products have acquired an excellent reputation, especially in the former Soviet Union. This was particularly the case for the transport vehicles “Berga-Tank”, Alltrans” and especially for MinCa.
Rick Howes, CEO at Dundee Precious Metals, has a made a transformational contribution. His vision is that mining requires new and innovative thinking on how the entire mining asset lifecycle is managed to regain credibility in delivering the business results stakeholders expect. Mining companies should focus on operational performance and project delivery through attention to detail. Rick put the first steps in using technology that creates transparency on underground mining activities and enables short interval controls overlying good planning and scheduling.