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APPROXIMATELY 90 per cent of the steel that is melted and refined in the United States and poured into ingots is made in basic open-hearth furnaces, as shown in Table 1-1. The annual ingot capacity of the steel industry reported January 1,1950, by the American Iron and Steel Institute8* was 99,040,160 tons, of which the basic open-hearth process accounted for 85,896,580 tons, 86.7 per cent of the total. The capacity of the individual furnaces varies over a wide range, a large majority falling within limits of 50 to 200 tons (Fig 1-1). Most of the units constructed [ ] since 1942 are in the larger size groups, between 175 and 225 tons capacity.

Jan 1, 1951

By Fred Pena

The VERTIMILL has proven itself to be a reliable performer in heavy duty industrial applications. Applications have been extensively used in the mining industry, flue gas desulfurization applications, and industrial minerals field. The machine is a vertically stirred machine that utilizes a screw operating in a grinding media. Grinding media types have ranged from several sizes of steel balls as the most common to pebbles or ceramic media. Mesh-of-grind and final product size are the determining criterion for the selection of the media size used. Product size consists have ranged from very coarse to super-fine grinds of less than 25 microns. Savings in consumption of power, grinding media, and liners when compared to a conventional ball mills, have been realized. Savings in consumption of reagents have also been demonstrated.

Jan 1, 1992

By E. C. Lane

During the past 15 years the Bureau of Mines has made and published several hundred analyses of typical petroleums and has developed a system of interpreting the analyses and of classifying crude oils. In describing crude petroleum frequent reference is made to the "base" of the oil, a usage the petroleum industry has found convenient. As part of its general study of the characteristics of crude oils, therefore, the Bureau of Mines has developed a system of classifying them according to "base." This system as first published in 1927 was limited to four classes and in its original form is no longer considered adequate. Since the system was first published the Bureau has analyzed a large number of crude oil, including representative samples from nearly every important producing field in the world, and has found that the system of classification could be revised and amplified to advantage. The revised system is presented herein.

Jan 1, 1935

By Chick Kerkering, Stephen Iverson

Perimeter control blasting is common in civil construction projects but not as common in mining. A poorly designed and executed underground mine development blast design can result in unwanted wall rock damage. This damage increases the risk of rock falls and injury. With the availability of good drilling equipment, it is a simple matter to add the few extra holes needed to change conventional drifting into drifting with perimeter control.

Jan 1, 2008

By John C. Hartley

Three systems that monitor ventilating fans are described. These electronic monitoring systems automatically perform most of the operations required to conform with the provisions of the Federal Mine Safety Code in the event of fan failure or slowdown.

Jan 1, 1964

By Thomas L. Craig

The Wellman-Lord SO2 Recovery Process is operating commercially at one location in this country and at two locations in Japan. Tail gases from a sulfuric acid plant, from an oil fired steam generator and from a sulfur recovery unit are the respective applications. 1) At the Olin Corporation's Paulsboro, New Jersey, stack gas from a spent acid regenerative sulfuric acid plant-45000 SCFM - is treated in the W-L unit to reduce sulfur dioxide concentrations from 4500 ppm to less than 500 ppm. 2) At the Japan Synthetic Rubber plant in Chiba Prefecture, stack gas from an oil-fired steam generating plant - 120,000 SUM - is reduced from 2100 ppm S02 to less than 200 ppm. 3) At the Toa Nenryo Kogyo refinery in Kanagawa Prefecture, tail gas from a sulfur recovery (Claus) unit - 41,000 SUM - with, an inlet SO2 concentration of up to 13000 ppm is reduced to less than 200 ppm. The three installations are operating successfully and are capable of reducing S02 emissions to levels significantly below the concentration guaranteed. With the one exception of a higher than guaranteed chemical make up requirement at Paulsboro, utility and chemical requirements will be less than design.

Jan 1, 1971

Mixed integer programming (MIP) has been used for optimizing production schedules of mines since the 1960s and is recognized a shaving significant potential for optimizing production scheduling problems for both surface and underground mining. The major problem in long-term production scheduling for underground orebodies generally relate to the large number of variables needed to formulate a MIP model, which makes it too complex to solve. As the number of variables in the model increase, solution times are known to increase at an exponential rate. In many instances the more extensive use of MIP models has been limited due to excessive solution times.

Jan 1, 2010

By N. J. Themelis

In the last two decades, the Outokumpu flash smelting process has become the dominant new technology for copper smelting and has? also been applied to the smelting of other metal sulfides. The application of oxygen enrichment and improvements in concentrate burner and furnace design have resulted in ever increasing smelting rates per unit volume of the reaction shaft. This paper examines the. rate phenomena taking place in the reaction shaft of the Outokumpu furnace and compares information obtained from a mathematical model of heat and mass transfer rates to results obtained in pi1ot tests conducted at Pori, Finland, and to actual performance of a number of flash smelters around the world. 2?

Jan 1, 1985

By W. W. Mullins, F. A. Nichols

Solutions are developed, assuming surface diffusion and both internal and external volume diffusion, for the relaxation of bodies slightly perturbed from spherical and cylindrical geometries. Combined with those previously published for the nearly planar case, these results provide a means of gaging the relative contributions of the two diffusional proc-cesses in any given case. It is shown that in all sintering experiments to date, and probably in any attainable in practice, surface diffusion has played the dominant role, although most previous authors have assumed otherwise. It is also shown that surface diffusion predominates in normal field-emission tip blunting and also for the coalescence of gas bubbles introduced into metals by a bombardment. The surface-diffusion solutions for a perturbed sphere are combined with previous results for volume diffusion to show that the inclusion of interface diffusion permits considerably larger spheres to develop in diffusion-controlled precipitate growth before the onset of instability. A mechanism is also proposed for the spheroidization of precipitate platelets as well as rods. In a previous paper1 the relaxation of a nearly plane surface to flatness by the combined action of the transport processes of viscous flow, evaporation-condensation (in a closed system), volume diffusion, and surface diffusion has been analyzed under the assumption that all surface properties are independent of orientation. In this treatment, criteria were developed for deciding which process predominates, and solutions valid in the latter stages of the sintering of small wires and particles to a plane were obtained. A numerical solution, valid throughout the entire particle-sintering process for the case of surface diffusion, was subsequently obtained by the present authors.' It was found that the analytic solution (which assumed small slopes everywhere) is accurate to within -10 pct when the maximum slope of the profile is less than 0.3; the wire-sintering problem has also been solved nu- merically for the case of surface diffusion and here again the results converge to the analytic small-slope solution at late stages of the process, the two solutions agreeing in this case to within 10 pct when the maximum slope of the profile is less than -0.6. The purpose of this paper is to extend the perturbation solutions to nearly spherical and nearly cylindrical geometries. We treat only the two principal diffusional processes, i.e., surface and volume, but for these geometries we discuss volume diffusion both inside and outside of the solid. Our results, when coupled with Mullins' solutions1 for nearly planar surfaces, provide criteria for gaging the relative contributions of surface and volume diffusion to the over-all transport process in three basic geometries. A very interesting feature in the cylindrical case is the occurrence of instability for longitudinal perturbations with wavelengths greater than the cylindrical circumference, a classical result. This instability of the cylindrical surface is applied to give a quantitative explanation for the often-observed "erratic" pore closure in the late stages of the sintering of wire compacts; also, the theory previously presented for the spheroidization of rod-shaped precipitates by surface (interface) diffusion' is expanded now to include volume diffusion inside and outside of the particle. The results for circumferential perturbations on a long cylinder allow quantitative estimates for gaging the relative importance of surface or volume diffusion in the early stages of the sintering of spheres or wires. The results here demonstrate clearly that surface diffusion has played a very important, if not dominant, role in all sintering experiments discussed in the literature, although the surface-diffusion contribution to the kinetics has usually been ignored. The results for the sphere (surface-diffusion case) are added to the results obtained previously by Mullins and sekerka3 concerning instabilities of a growing spherical precipitate particle (with interface diffusion disallowed) to obtain a general solution to this problem including interface diffusion. The inclusion of interface diffusion is found to increase significantly the range of stability of a growing spherical precipitate for typical metallurgical cases. The following assumptions are made: (i) the initial surface lies everywhere near and has a slope differing only slightly from that of the reference

Jan 1, 1965

By James R. Craig

The Central and Southern Appalachians were the major sources of gold in the United States throughout the first half of the 19th century and have continued to yield gold to the present day. Small amounts of gold were probably extracted by the Indians and the Spaniards but the first documented report of gold in the region was made by Thomas Jefferson who found a four pound lump of gold ore, which yielded 0.85 troy oz., in the Rappahannock River of Virginia in 1782. Gold was subsequently discovered in North Carolina between 1793 and 1799, in Virginia in 1806, in South Carolina in 1827, in Georgia in 1829 and in Alabama about 1830 (Becker, 1894-5; Pardee and Park, 1948). The gold belts of the Central and Southern Appalachian Piedmont and Blue Ridge Provinces are shown in Figure 1. The superimposed circles indicate the mount of production from some of the more productive and well known areas. Although North Carolina produced far more gold than the other states, the most significant concentrated area of production is the Dahlonega District in Georgia which yielded more than 500,000 troy ounces. After discovery, gold production increased rapidly as shown in Figure 2. Production was at its maximum between 1830 and 1852 with combined totals generally exceeding 30,000 troy ounces per year. Production dropped sharply after the California gold rush in 1849 as experienced miners moved westward in search of bigger and easier stakes. After the Civil War briefly halted gold mining in the Appalachians, production rose to an average of about 8,000 ounces per year from 1865 until 1878 and to an average of about 13,000 ounces per year from 1881 until 1915 when it again fell to near nil (Pardee and Park, 1948). Minor resurgences occurred in the 1930's and 1940's. Although there has been no reported production in recent years, it is likely that "weekend panners" still remove hundreds of ounces from streams annually. The total reported production for the area through 1959 is in excess of 2.5 million troy ounces.

Jan 1, 1981

By Forsythe DJ, Sun S-S Andrew AS

Paragenetic, fluid inclusion, stable isotope, and 87Sr/86Sr and 143Nd/144Nd isotope studies of the Mt Carbine tungsten deposit in North Queensland provide information on the sources of the mineralising components and record the history of fluid-rock interaction during the hydrothermal process. The ore minerals , wolframite and scheelite , are contained in quartz veins which post-date the major deformations in the Siluro-Devonian Hodgkinson Formation . Mineralisation was immediately preceded by the emplacement of the Mossman Batholith (280 ¦ 7 Ma). Two major stages of mineralisation are present and separated by a brittle fracturing episode . The stable isotope and Sr and Nd isotope data suggest that the ore fluids during stage I and most of stage II mineralisation were a mixture of magmatic water and non-magmatic water (connate or metamorphic) which had experienced a long residence time and had extensively exchanged with the sediments at high temperature. Subsequent mineralisation events were dominated by fluids of meteoric derivation with a short residence time. The data imply that other solutes, such as W, were probably derived in minor part from local country rock sources with the major contribution coming from a magmatic source related to the granite batholith.

Jan 1, 1987

By Herbert D. Drechsler

La financiación minera está inter-relacionada con los siguientes aspectos: "determinatión de los recursos totales a utilizar en una empresa minera; adjudicación eficiente de estos recursos a los varios multiples activos de la empresa; y obtención del mejor balance financiero en relación con la situación general de toda la compañia". La primera parte comprende un repaso de los problemas financieros a traves del estudio y análisis del Balance General y Cuenta de Explotación. La parte siguiente es una exposición de la naturaleza de los criterion desarrollados en el estudio de viabilidad. La tercera parte describe las fuentes de financiación del capital, y la parte final describe casos prácticos de financiación minera.

Jan 1, 1982

By Baozhong Zhao

Experimental results have shown that fluxing with soda ash (Na:zC03) can remove As and Sb from molten copper at the rate of As>Sb, but is relatively ineffective in removing Hi. The rate of impurity removal is controlled by impurity mass transfer in the metal phase. In this paper, a mathematical model was developed to describe the impurity removal phenomena. The model incorporates the effects of molten bath mixing intensity, soda ash feeding rate, oxygen content in the molten copper and soda ash fluxing by surface addition and injection. The model predictions are in good agreement with experimental results and may be used in designing large scale tests.

Jan 1, 1996

By M Wortley, J McKay, D La Rosa, O Guyo

It has been a generally held concept that crushing operations were, by their nature, too simple to benefit from the implementation of advanced process control. The commissioning of an OCS¬ expert control system and image-based oversize detection system, VisioRock, at the Pilbara Iron Tom Price facility are dispelling these notions. A constraint-based OCS¬ expert control system has been designed and commissioned on the high-grade crushing and screening plant along with a vision-based oversize detection system functioning on six product conveyor belts. To date, the expert control has demonstrated the ability to increase production by maximising dynamic constraint utilisation. Dynamic constraint utilisation is a concept developed by Rio Tinto Technical Services for effectively evaluating constraint-based control logic performance. The VisioRock system has been installed and configured and has been operating for a period of several months. Currently, Tom Price and Metso personnel are working to define correct oversize detection thresholds. Details of the plant implementation are discussed.

Jan 1, 2005

By K. W. Harris, K. A. Perry

Reserve depletion in Central Appalachia is continuously creating unique ground conditions for underground coal mines with many of these difficult environments directly attributable to multiple seam mining and/or deeper overburdens. While many empirical studies have been performed in an effort to improve understanding of these problems along with potentially improving safety and extraction, many of the difficulties encountered lie outside of the normal realm of expected behavior. This is often the case when mining in bump prone ground, where additional concerns are introduced and design buffers are warranted. The boundary element software LaModel was used to study three bump events in a deep-cover, multiple-seam reserve located in Harlan county in the Kentucky region of Central Appalachia. This region is notoriously bump prone due to significant areas of deep cover, the presence of strong to massive lithology (such as sandstone), and an extensive history of underground mining that increases the probability of multiple seam interactions. Multiple seam interactions are best understood with respect to site-specific parameters, including both the geological and geometrical components of interburden, overburden and mine workings. Initially, empirical-based approaches (ARMPS/AMSS) were used when attempting to back-analyze the bump events. However, it was recognized that a more detailed investigation was necessary to understand the fundamental causes/conditions associated with the bump events. Consequently, the LaModel study resulted in a mine-specific calibration method for the reserve. With this method in place, enhanced bump prediction throughout the reserve is expected, such that the stability, recovery and safety of future mining may be improved.

Jan 1, 2014

By David S. Yantek, Paul Jurovcik, Eric R. Bauer

Workers in coal preparation plants, where vibrating screens are significant noise sources, are often exposed to sound levels exceeding 90 dB(A). The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a major coal company, and a vibrating screen manufacturer conducted a cooperative study of vibrating screen noise. Rubber isolators reduced sound levels by 1 dB. Urethane screen panels did not reduce sound levels in this case. Drive noise was determined to be the dominant noise source on the screen. Damped side plates reduced vibration levels on the screen sides by 1 to 7 dB(A). Detailed results of the study are presented.

By J. H. Henderson, L. A. Wilson, R. L. Gergins, R. J. Wygal, D. W. Reed

This paper presents a method of predicting the production history of an underground combustion recovery process. A rigorous solution of the thermodynamics and hydrodynamics involved is beyond the scope of this report. However, a practical scheme to appraise combustion recovery performance has been Worked out. By prudent assumptions, regarding the attainment of steady-state conditions, a trial-and-error solution, which satisfies both material balance and three-phase relative permeability requirements has been evolved and tested. As a combustion zone moves through a formation the interstitial water, the water of combustion and a portion of the oil wil1 be vaporized. These vapors will move downstream to a cooler region of the formation where they will condense. Part of the remaining oil will be displaced by the imposed gas drive and what remains behind will be consumed as fuel. The fluids will distribute themselves downstrean? in a manner which will satisfy the three-phase relative permeability characteristics of the formation. Three distinct zones will exist ahead of the combustion zone: (I) a zone termed a water bank which contains three mobile phases, oil, water and gas; (2) a region containing two mobile phases, oil and gas, called the oil bank; and (3) a zone having the fluid saturution distribution which existed prior to combustion. The mobile water will impose a water flood on the oil in the region containing three flowing phases. The process can be visualized as a simultaneous water .flood and combustion-supported gas drive. It is possible to estimate the saturation distributions in the water bank and oil bank as well as the production history for any combustion temperuture if the porosity, three-phase relative permeability characteristics, oil viscosity and initial saturations are known. This has been done for injection pressures ranging from I to 100 atm, oil viscosities of 10 to 1,000 cp and porosities from 20 to 40 per cent. Several of these calculations have been checked in the laboratory, with the result indicating rather good agreement between the predicted and observed production histories. The analytical and experimental techniques are described and the comparison of predicted and observed performance presented. INTRODUCTION Considerable research by the oil industry during the past 10 years has been directed toward the thermal recovery of crude oil. Of all schemes considered, the one receiving the most attention is in situ combustion. This is a process in which part of the oil is actually burned within the reservoir rock. The uniqueness of the process lies in its potential. Theoretically, this potential generates from the following: (1) it may open the door to vast reserves previously not economically producible, (2) it may induce increased production rates where low rates are now realized and (3) it may give high over-all recovery efficiency. The general idea of the process has received considerable attention in the literature '-' and the following brief description is intended for orientation only. In situ combustion can be visualized by considering a linear system, one end of which represents the injection well and the other the producing well. The formation at the inlet end is raised to ignition temperature by placing a gas or electric heater at the face of the formation or by the ignition of thermite, charcoal or similar material. While heating, the water and part of the oil in the heated region is vaporized and moved out into the reservoir by the injection of gas containing oxygen. In addition, part of the oil is displaced as liquid by the imposed gas drive. The oil not displaced is modified to an immobile, coke-like material (hereafter referred to as coke) by the high temperatures existing immediately ahead of the combustion zone. This coke is used as fuel, and the combustion front advances through the formation at a temperature which is probably in excess of 800°F. As the combustion front advancek it will drive ahead all interstitial oil not rendered immobile and all interstitial water plus the water formed by the combustion of hydrogen. As a result the sand behind the combustion zone is freed of all oil and water. Although the general description of the process has been outlined in the literature, there has been no consideration of the behavior of the fluids moving downstream from the combustion front. It is the purpose of this paper to present a technique

By U. F. Kocks

The flow stress in some latent slip systems of aluminum and silver crystals after various deformations in single slip was investigated by transverse compression and supplemented by experiments on overshoot of the compression axis and the stability of corner orientations. Work hardening was found to be remarkably isotropic, the ratio of the flow stress in the latent system to that in the primary system being between 1.0 and 1.3. The strain-rate dependence was not significantly larger in the latent system. This low anisotropy suggests that specific dislocation interactions are not the direct cause of work hardening. Either the obstacles are essentially impenetrable so that only their distance enters, or a fairly random distribution of dislocations of all systems is. in fact. formed during single slip. The latter seems to he excluded by the observations on the strain-mte dependence and on the amount of secondary strain. The amount of seconzdary strains occurring in single slip was determined by shape-change mensurements and by a new method connected with the latent-hardening experiments. It is definitely less than 1/300 times the strain in the primary svstem. WORK hardening is due to dislocation interactions; this is a hypothesis, and possibly the only one, on which all present work-harden ing theories agree. About a dozen specific interactions have been considered, and it is unlikely that any essential one has been missed. Different work-hardening theories differ to a large extent in the specific interactions which are deemed most important. The presence or absence of any particular interaction, and its degree, depend on the geometrical relationships between the two dislocations interacting. Let us enumerate some examples. Two dislocations may react, with a varying reaction energy, to form a third dislocation, and this reaction product may be sessile or glissile. Two dislocations may intersect and a jog may be formed on both, on one of them, or on neither; this jog may be sessile17Z or glissile and it may, if moved nonconservatively, lead to the production of vacancies or interstitials. Finally, a dislocation may bypass another one and thus interact only with its stress field. All these interactions depend on the specific relation between the Burgers vectors and line directions of the two dislocations. Any dislocation generated during plastic deformation of fcc crystals belongs to one of twelve slip systems. Taking any one dislocation, its relationship to each of the other eleven can fall, by symmetry, into one of only five classes. These relationships are enumerated in Fig. 1 and Table I. Each slip system is represented in the stereo-graphic projection by two triangles, namely those in one of which the specimen axis would have to lie if the specimen were to deform in single slip on this slip system in a given sense, in a tension test. Let us represent the primary slip system by the shaded triangles. The other slip systems are classified only with respect to their relationship to this primary system. The code letters (initials of established names* in German) are explained in Table I. Three specific interactions are also listed in cases where they may be strong: the product of a reaction, the formation of jogs in either system, and the elastic bypass stress. The last column relates to the types of experiments reported in this paper and summarizes their results. To decide experimentally between the relative importance of the various interactions one would like to produce a group of dislocations in one slip system and then measure the stress necessary to force another group of dislocations of a specific second system through them. Hopefully, one can produce the first set of dislocations by plastically deforming the specimen in single slip. Then one can try to achieve single slip in a specific, previously latent system and measure its flow stress. If it is different from the virgin flow stress, there has been "latent hardening". Some types of latent-hardening experiments will be discussed in the next section. The strain-rate and temperature dependence of the flow stress is an indication of the importance of dislocation intersections. By extending an investigation of this dependence to the latent systems, one can determine how much more important forest contributions are here. seeger3 has used the as-

Jan 1, 1964

By Hugh D. Pallister, Richard W. Smith

The Alabama flake-graphite industry has flourished only in times of war when importations of foreign graphite for crucible use have been greatly curtailed or cut off. World War I was a boom period and in 1918 some 30 plants produced 7,795,475 lb. of flake graphite. The industry languished following the war and no graphite was produced from 1929 to 1939. The Federal Bureau of Mines began investigating the Alabama graphite deposits in 1940 and worked out modern recovery methods that were applied to production during part of World War II. A prospecting program disclosed reserves of over 25 million tons of graphitic schists. In 1942 the War Production Board authorized the enlargement of the only plant then producing flake graphite and the construction of two new plants. Production of flake graphite from these three plants in 1943 is estimated at 8,100,000 lb. Increased imports from Madagascar late in 1943 shut down one of the new plants and curtailed production at the other. Alabama flake graphite has not yet been able to compete with Madagascar graphite for use in the manufacture of any but small graphite crucibles. The future of the industry must depend on meeting the higher carbon content demanded for other uses.

Jan 1, 1945

By C. Cigna, M. Patrucco, D. Savoca, E. Lovera

The paper deals with the activity program and the preliminary results of a research work commissioned by IReR Research Centre and Regione Lombardia to the Department of Land, Environment and Geotechnologies of Politecnico di Torino. The aim is to define measurement, analysis and control criteria for the emission of chemical and physical pollutants from non-metal mining industries, with particular reference to noise and airborne particulates. Such emissions are related to health risks and annoyance problems, both for the working crews and the neighbouring population, and so, in order to get an effective sustainability of the industry, suitable reduction methods and assessment tools are required. A simple technique for the evaluation and forecasting of both the emission levels and deriving impact has been tested at different mining and quarrying sites, considering their differences in terms of layout and exploitation method, the latter ascribed to a series of main typologies as present in Lombardia region.

Jan 1, 2005