Archives: General

Eickhoff South Africa (ESA), located in Johannesburg, is the South African distribution and service hub of the global operating Eickhoff Group of Companies headquartered in Bochum, Germany. In recent months ESA has been going through restructuring and consolidation processes which the parent says “have become necessary after ten years of growing the business.” By the end of 2013 ESA says[…]

EZ-ID software running on an oreXpress portable spectrometer is one solution for fast, easy, and accurate mineral identification in the field. EZ-ID matches the unknown mineral against a known spectral library and is now available with the SpecMIN library from Spectral International. SpecMIN includes an extensive and dynamic library of over 494 infrared active mineral species with[…]

Chinese coal mining group Xishan Jinxing Energy is using three Voith fill-controlled 866 TPKL fluid couplings underground in the powerful 4.8 MW drive of the main belt conveyor in the Xiegou No 12 coal mine in Shanxi Province. The three 1,600 kW drives power the 1,900 m long main inclined belt conveyor. This conveyor transports[…]

Atlas Copco is to launch a new mobile underground rig called Easer, which is capable of performing both box hole boring and down-reaming with a hole diameter of 750 mm, as well as conventional raiseboring with a hole diameter of up to 1,200 mm. Since its introduction in the mid-1960s, the raiseboring technique has been considered one of the safest[…]

Dassault Systèmes has released the latest version of GEOVIA Surpac, the geology and mine planning software application that is used worldwide. Surpac 6.6 provides powerful underground engineering tools that are especially suited for the design of stope shapes. The new Stope Design Tools module enables underground engineers and designers “to accomplish stope design tasks efficiently[…]

The University of Nottingham and Rio Tinto have agreed a £6 million, five year partnership “to deliver the next generation of innovative technologies for the mining industry.” The Rio Tinto Centre for Emergent Technologies opened this week and is described as a new centre of excellence “which will develop world-changing technologies to address issues related[…]

Oxford Instruments has announced the launch of the new X-MET7500 Mining Analyser, which it says incorporates the latest XRF detector technology, “providing a superb combination of speed, flexibility and ease of use for on-site mining and soil analysis.” The X-MET7500 Mining Analyser is described as delivering the versatility of a laboratory but in the field, enabling[…]

For those of you who missed it, or were unaware of it, yesterday was Saint Barbara’s day.  We hope you had a good day. St Barbara is our patron saint and is too for a variety of craftsmen, not just miners and geologists, but firefighters and artillerymen as well. A number of legends differ slightly over her story.[…]

Avalon Rare Metals, a Canadian mineral development company focused on rare metals and minerals in Canada, has launched a new website that covers developments in rare metals material science and applications. The new website, named Rare Metals Matter (www.raremetalsmatter.com), will feature technical information on the underlying rare metal properties and qualities that make many of[…]

Clariant, the global speciality chemicals group, today announced the opening of its newest Mining Application and Development Centre (CADM) for Clariant Mining Solutions in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, which will serve as the company’s global excellence centre for iron/phosphate ores and pelletising. “The CADM is strategically located in Belo Horizonte, at the heart of the Brazilian mining industry,[…]