Search Documents

By Leland O. Erdahi

Many problems have surfaced in our economy during this decade, and the mining industry has certainly had its share: huge capital outlays for environmental controls, volatile markets, double-digit inflation, inadequate capital markets, political uncertainties-plus shortages of energy, manpower, supplies, and equipment. All these and other problems have left their visible marks on the economy of our industry. Solutions are slow in coming; perhaps, in some instances, there are no right answers. However, it appears that many companies are using joint ventures to an increasing extent in efforts to reach partial solutions to some of these problems. A joint venture does present an economic alternative that should be examined-especially when trying to answer questions arising within the current economic context. The dictionary defines "venture" as an undertaking involving chance, risk, or danger. The word was originally applied to hazardous undertakings involving delivery of cargoes to distant ports and subsequent disposition of the merchandise, but it is now applied to any project of limited scope and temporary duration. When two or more entities join in such a project, it becomes a joint venture, and this is the context in which I have used the term. Joint ventures may be formed for exploration, for development of a new ore body, or for expansion of an existing operation. Each requires different approaches for negotiating and drafting the agreement governing the conduct of the joint venture.

Jan 9, 1975

By Richard P. Rothwell

REVOLING slime-tables with stationary sprays and oscillating brushes have for many years been a favorite apparatus used for working slimes in German dressing-works, often displacing Rittinger tables and the many variations of Cornish buddles. The difficulty of building these tables larger than 5 1/2 meters (17 feet) in diameter, increasing the cost and making them unwieldy, rendered it necessary also to concentrate the slimes in several operations, because the travel over so short a length of hearth would not suffice for close concentration. A preliminary sizing is effected in a system of spitzkasten. Herr C. Linkenbach, general manager of the Ems Lead and Silver Works, Germany, devised a buddle, in 1878, which has since worked well and found much favor in Germany, and has been in one instance copied here, at Colorado Springs, without any credit having been given to the original inventor. Linkenbach's plan has been to reverse the functions of the table and the washing apparatus of the old German revolving table. He makes the tables stationary and rotates the washing apparatus,, thus enabling him to save in power, and, within certain limits, to increase the dimensions of the table, without in any way affecting its durability or materially increasing its cost. In its earlier form, the buddle was single, and that type is still

Jan 1, 1883

By Frederick J. Rich

INTRODUCTION Coal characterization involves a variety of analyses which are designed to yield as much information as possible about the properties of coal. The types of analyses which are now regarded as necessary for any truly quantitative assessment of coal include the following: 1. proximate analysis 2. ultimate analysis 3. petrographic analysis The two traditional forms of analyses are the proximate and ultimate types. A proximate determination reveals the amount of moisture, volatile matter, fixed carbon, and ash which are present in the coal. Nowadays, a sulfur determination is usually included in the proximate analysis. The ultimate analysis, in contrast, includes a major alkaline oxide determination, which tells how much sodium, calcium, and potassium are found in a sample. Sulfur forms, i.e. sulfide and sulfate vs organic sulfur, are also identified as well as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and trace element concentrations. Proximate and ultimate analyses have been used for many years. The petrographic analysis, one which identifies and quantifies organic microcomponents of coal, is a comparatively new technique of coal characterization. Petrography adds great detail to a coal analysis and, to be sure, is a necessary component of any complete analysis. Coal is not at all uniform in its composition. Material from different mines within one coal-producing region will display varia-

Jan 1, 1983

Human progress has a visible material phase, easily discernible, that is expressed in the standard of living. This material phase, however, is only the outward expression of a spiritual or mental phase that acts as a driving force in making humanity improve both its outlook and its mode of living. The instrument of progress is the human brain. Under the urge of spiritual drive, the brain acts as a focal point to utilize the forces of nature and put them to work for the benefit of mankind. Besides intelligence, which is an innate quality, the tools of the human brain are knowledge, experience, training, initiative, and skill. Given sufficient intelligence, the human brain can make an amazing amount of progress, provided it is supplied with an adequate spiritual and moral urge and a good technical background. It is the role of education to sup- ply such a background. The material phase of human progress proceeds on a series of parallel fronts, all of them interdependent to some extent (Fig. 7). The rise of the standard of living, dependent as it is upon the manufacture and mass distribution of goods, is based essentially upon the development and utilization of the material resources of a country or land area. This development involves the extraction of mineral and organic products from Mother Earth, their transportation to manufacturing centers, their transformation into finished goods and their dis-

Jan 1, 1950

By L. S. McNickle

Commonly accepted maintenance methods are being outdated by the rapid acceptance and use of more complicated hydraulic circuitry on modern mining equipment. It is no longer adequate to use the maintenance program to merely repair or sustain equipment operation. Ever increasing operating costs place a huge premium on lost production time. It has, therefore, placed the maintenance programs in the position of being required to alleviate equipment malfunctions on production shifts and still attain the maximum unit life from each component part. Ireland mine of Hanna Coal Co., which operates two production shifts and one maintenance shift per day, performs hydraulic maintenance with a plan that is geared to assure the bulk of work being handled on the midnight or maintenance shift. Production is thus allowed to continue without interruption from major hydraulic component malfunction. The plan is called selective maintenance because the specific part to be worked on and the time the work is to be accomplished are selected according to a definite plan.

Jan 10, 1961

By S. D. Michaelson

Open pits and quarries are the major sources of all "hard rock" tonnage mined today. Normally, ore is fractured from the pit face by blasting and then truck-hauled to a primary crusher where pro- cessing begins; overburden (or waste) is generally truck-hauled from the pit to dump areas. Truck haulage of blasted ore and overburden accounts for some 25 to 50% of total mining costs in a typical open pit and commonly is the largest single cost factor. Obviously then, cost reduction efforts should properly focus on improving existing haulage systems and developing new breakthrough techniques for material transport. Continuous flow systems for large tonnages ordinarily will result in a lower cost than batch systems such as truck or rail haulage. Continuous flow with pipelines for liquids and slurries, or conveyors for medium to coarse dry materials (in the -8-in. range) are the economic answers for bulk materials handling over reasonable distances.

Jan 11, 1968

By David G. Chedgy, Wen L. Chen, Bill S. Taylor

Theoretically the heavy medium cyclone is capable of cleaning raw coal from a top size of about 38 mm (1 1/2 in.) to a bottom size of about 200 mesh. With this idea, plants have been built recently using the heavy medium cyclone without desliming. The full size range down to zero is fed into the cyclone. Products + 28 mesh are removed in the normal manner on drain and rinse screens. The 28 x 200 mesh products are recovered separately from the magnetic separator tailings. Simplicity of flowsheet and plant operation coupled with the high efficiency of the heavy medium cyclone makes this a very attractive approach.

Jan 1, 1980

Magnetic Measurements on Auriferous Veins in Brazil. BY MARK C MA¬LAMPHY (Contribution 72-Preprint; also Trans, vol 110 4900 words) One of the lesser known gold-bearing regions of Brazil is in the vicinity of Lavras, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul Recently the Companhia Estrada de Ferro e Minas Sao Jeronymo has been making a detailed survey of the area, and the author of this paper was requested to study the possibility of applying geophysical methods. The present paper gives a few details of the work and the results obtained The problem was difficult and the results not particularly brilliant, according to the author, but the data are believed to represent another advance in the application of the magnetic method of prospecting The instrument used was a Schmidt-Lloyd vertical magnetic field balance made by Askania Werke It did not prove of value for the discovery of auriferous veins of the type there found It is believed, however, that fair results may be expected when studying the continuation of veins that disappear under alluvial covering The data thus obtained should be of exceptional value in directing the excavational work of prospecting A short appendix to the paper gives the results of magnetic observations in the Sao Jeronymo coal mine

Jan 1, 1935

By M. J. Ginsberg, N. A. Gokcen

THE preliminary study of electrochemical desul-furization performed by Ohtani and Gokcen1 left a number of points concerning the process to be investigated. Two of these were i) the determination of the effect of greater current and voltage on the desulfurizing Flower of acid slags (% CaO/% SiO2- 1) and ii) the possibility of the loss of silica in slag by the reactions 2C (in metal) + SiO2 (slag) = Si (in metal) + 2CO(g) and C + SiO2 (in slag) = SiO(g) + cO(g) proceeding to a point at which the composition of the slag was sufficiently altered toward the basic side so a1.s to noticeably affect the rate of de-sulfurization. The apparatus and the procedure used in the present investigation were the same as those used by Ohtani and Gokcen, except the control circuit was connected to 120 v dc instead of 24 v dc and thereby allowed greater freedom in choosing the values of both current and voltage. The graphite crucible containing the melt and serving as the cathode was 3-in. high, and was of 1 1/2-in. ID with a graphite bar of 3/8-in. diam and 8-in. length threaded into the bottom for electrical connection. This was placed into a magnesja outer crucible with a hole in the bottom and alumina insulation was packed between the two crucibles. A charge consisting of 180 g of

Jan 1, 1962

By I. Iwasaki, K. A. Nataratjan

In a previous paper, ozone was shown to remove residual xanthates in flotation pulp solutions as well as to destroy the xanthate coating on bulk copper-nickel sulfide concentrates before differential flotation (Iwasaki and Malicsi, 1985). The oxidation and decom- position mechanisms of xanthate solutions in the presence of commonly used oxidants such as oxygen, chlorine, hypochlorite, bromine, iodine, and hydrogen peroxide at different pH levels have been reported in the past (Rao, 1971). Most of these studies have been restricted to xanthate solutions of pH less than 10. Very few references are available on xanthate decomposition in highly alkaline (pH > 12) solutions (Jones and Woodcock, 1983; Philipp and Fichte, 1960; Tipman and Leja, 1975). No systematic study of xanthate oxidation by ozone has been reported, although its use in flotation has been recognized of late (Allegrini et al., IWO; Ishii et al., 1970; Matsubara et al., 1978). To improve the efficiency of ozone use in flotation, it is essential to understand the mechanisms involved in the decomposition of xanthates with ozone, more specifically, to establish the stoichiometry and decomposition rate. In the present work, a preliminary attempt was made to investigate the effect of pH on xanthate decomposition, and probable mechanisms of xanthate oxidation with ozone.

Jan 1, 1986

By John W. Bader

Probing a mineralized area with a core drill to find out what's there is fundamentally a simple task, but a costly one. Quite commonly it costs $10, and sometimes more, to extract and assay each foot of drill core obtained. Yet, it is not unusual today to drill hundreds of holes on one mineral property. The initial objective of such probing is almost always simply to determine the potential worth of the ore- body, if any exists, and the question naturally arises: How little sampling is enough for this determination? The mathematics of statistics infer accuracy of estimates largely from the sheer number of samples taken. Mineral exploration usually involves accumulation of large numbers of samples, and thus it is usually not difficult to place narrow confidence limits on either side of the estimated average grade of a sampled orebody. The determination may, or may not, be as accurate as the derivations imply. If it is not, the fault is probably one of misapplication and not with the statistical processes themselves. Un- fortunately, indications are strong that the ordinary statistics of sampling usually cannot be applied to orebody exploration samples with actual attainment of the accuracy of estimate that they express mathematically. For this reason, a more deductive, less mathematical analysis of the sampling may well be worthwhile.

Jan 1, 1970

By Frank Firmstone

The indicator cards shown herewith were taken by the writer in June, 1877, from the water-pressure blowing engine of the Longdale Iron Co., at Lucy Selina Furnace, Longdale, Virginia. A description of' this engine with figures, and some indicator cards, was published by Washington Jones, Esq., Superintendent of the I. P. Morris Co.,* in the Journal of the Franklin Institute for May, 1877, to which those desiring a full account are referred, but for convenience the principal dimensions, etc., are given below. The machine consists of a pair of horizontal direct-acting blowing engines, connected at right angles to a common fly-wheel shaft. The blowing cylinders are 4 ft. diameter by 5 ft. stroke; the water cylinders were 18 in. diameter by 5 ft. stroke as built. Both water and blowing cylinders are double acting. The water valves are balanced piston valves, 18 in. diameter, moved directly by eccentrics on the fly-wheel- shaft. Great care was taken to have the areas of the ports and passages at least equal to the area of the working piston. The engine is set about 14 ft. above the tail-race, and the

Jan 1, 1879

By D. W. Fuerstenau

Recently R. J. Charles1 showed that comminution of brittle or semi-brittle materials in batch operations is described more appropriately by a variable energy relationship than by the specific relation- ships proposed by Rittinger,2 Kick,3 and Bond.4 That is, the value of n in the empirical differential operation which applies to crushing and grinding (Eq. 1) is variable. Independently, Holmes6 developed an identical generalized equaton for size reduction. The experimental data of Charles and Holmes show that the value of n is determined by the material and the comminuting machine and is constant for a given combination of these two conditions. The general objective of the present article is to extend the Charles-Holmes concepts to continuous ball milling. The specific objective is to analyze the operation of a vibratory ball mill dry-grinding chromite in a continuous open circuit and to develop an equation for the comminution of chromite in this mill.

Jan 12, 1959

By W. G. Moffatt, J. Wulff

BRAZED joints and their strength have for some time been of great practical as well as theoretical interest. A good summary of the previous work in this field may be found in the reports of the Armour Research Foundation. In spite of excessive scatter in test data, the fact that the strength of a brazed joint may exceed the ultimate strength of the brazing material itself by many times continues to be of interest and of value in engineering. That this is qualitatively due to plastic constraint of the brazing material by the faying surfaces of the base metal is not in dispute, yet no complete interpretation of the data exists. The purpose of the present work is not to provide such a new interpretation, but to report new experimental data which we hope may lead to a better understanding of the important variables concerned. The work of Bredz' definitely shows that the thinner a brazed joint is, the greater is its strength. Dianeter of a joint has seldom been taken into

Jan 1, 1958

By John A. Church

THE Lake Superior blast-furnaces probably represent the maximum economy of fuel possible in this country. They smelt an ore which is very rich and easily reducible, and as the small amount of gangue present is not all silica, but in part a silicate, the amount of limestone required is a minimum. The average yield of the ore treated at six furnaces was 63 per cent., and the average quantity of limestone 179 pounds per ton of pig. The fuel used is charcoal, so burned as to retain most of the combustible volatile part, which, before the utilization of furnace-gas, was burned away. With these conditions it is not surprising that the Lake Superior charcoal practice is extraordinary in almost every respect. In any scientific discussion of American furnace work, the establishments there will be found at the head of the list, and they work under conditions which are extremely favorable for careful study. The Bay Furnace, near Marquette, has the honor of carrying "the broom" for the largest daily make. With a capacity of 1908 cubic feet it has, for months together, produced 29 tons of pig, graded at

Jan 1, 1876

A new $18-million hydrometallurgical ore treatment facility for the recovery of molybdenum oxide was dedicated at Climax, Colo., on November 19 by Climax Molybdenum Co., division of AMAX. The Company has been producing molybdenum from molybdenite (MoS2) ores since 1918. Now oxide values, formerly lost in the sulfide flotation plant tailing are to be processed to yield about 3 million Ib per year of metal. In 1965, Climax produced about 50% of world molybdenum from sulfide ore. This ore is mined at the rate of 42,000 tpd. The annual production of concentrate is 100 million lb containing 90% to 92% MoS2, or about 50 million lb of metal. As only a relatively small portion of the total Climax production is sufficiently enriched in oxide molybdenum to process through the new plant, 5700 tpd of selected ore containing 1.5 lb of Mo per ton is now treated by the new process.

Jan 12, 1966

By R. Costantini

Long-distance transportation of solids by hydraulic pipelines holds promise of great economic benefits. In most mineral processing plants today, moving of solids in slurry-form by pipeline is commonplace. Yet in spite of this, the method is slow in being adopted on a broad scale for moving solids over distances of many miles. This is especially surprising in view of the successful realization of two daring ventures in long-distance solids pipelines in this nation within the last five years. One is the 72-mile long, 6-in. diam. pipeline of the American Gilsonite Co. which has been satisfactorily transporting 700 tpd of gilsonite from the mine at Bonanza, Utah, to the processing plant at Grand Junction, Colo., since April 1957. The other is the 108-mile long, 10-in. pipeline of the Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Co., which has been transporting about 4000 tpd of finely crushed coal from the mine at Cadiz, Ohio, to the Eastlake Power Plant of the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. since January 1958.

Jan 8, 1961

By Joseph J. Yancik, Leonard L. Felts, George B. Clark

Little information has been published concerning the actual or useful amount of energy obtained from explosives when they are used for blasting. To provide more data on this subject, 8-in. neet cement cubes were blasted in a steel plate box and the breakage energy evaluated by comparison with drop crusher results using Rittinger's," ' Kick's,%nd Bond's' theories. Theories by Bond and Wang," Lineau,' Hatch,' Roller," and others were not considered applicable. Those used in this investigation may be expressed mathematically as follows: [ ] The above equations were employed to determine values of KK, K for particle size distributions similar to those obtained from the blasting curves. These values were in turn used as a means of approximating the specific energy of the blasted material. The efficiency of crushing by blasting was then determined by dividing this specific energy by the maximum available work of the explosive per gram of cement.

Mar 1, 1956

By Richard D. Snouffer

Prime topics of conversation these days are the new concepts of rail haulage for bulk items such as iron ore, potash and coal. We have heard such ideas as the "integral train" and the "unit train" discussed frequently during the past two years at various AIME meetings, and progress reports have kept up a steady appearance in the technical press and in local newspapers. While no railroad has a complete "unit train" in service at this moment, one has 50 fast-discharge cars under construction and the Pennsylvania Railroad has experimented with radio-controlled motive power distributed at intervals throughout the train. To a great extent, however, the promise for greater efficiency and lower costs held out to industry by these new haulage methods is dependent not on greater speed or larger cars or more dedicated equipment alone but, rather, on the utilization of modern practices in the loading and unloading of rail cars. It is the purpose here to examine these two key steps and the up-to-date procedures and equipment they entail.

Jan 7, 1963

By Sylvia Whitehead, G. M. Schwartz, J. N. Gundersen

Sylvia Whitehead (Petrologist, The Broken Hill Propriety Co. Ltd., Melbourne, Australia) — Examination of thin sections of jaspilites from numerous banded iron formations in Australia has revealed no evidence to suggest that silicate minerals have formed by reaction between magnetite and silica. Textural relations indicate that part of the magnetite crystallized very early in the history of the rocks, probably during diagenesis, and remained stable under conditions of metamorphism altering only to hematite or limonite under conditions of oxidation and weathering. Many jaspilites also contain later magnetite which is almost certainly of metamorphic origin. Wherever magnetite is present in quartz rich bands containing little or no silicate or carbonate, it is very fine grained and occurs generally as isolated, well formed octahedral crystals or as small crystalline aggregates. These show no evidence of corrosion or reaction with the quartz even in rocks where adjacent bands contain silicate minerals of moderate to high metamorphic grade. Concerning the silicate minerals, it is reasonably certain that bands of very fine grained stilpnomelane

Jan 1, 1963