05/01/2014
Dear MOG members,
Next week on Wednesday, May 7th at 5:30 pm at MIT in Room 66-154 (http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=66) we will have our MOG Lecture: "Ore Sorting: Changing the economic outlook of hard rock mining with declining head grades and rising production costs" to be given by Joe Lessard, a Project Manager at Orchard Material Technology, LLC (www.orchardtec.com) a regular of our club. Joe's Bio and the Lecture description can be found below, which is an extremely innovative approach and we suggest you don't miss it.
Great news! We will be web steaming this event (thanks to a recent partnership with BS Grupo, which we will announce soon) before the event in case you guys want to tune in or have people you know who would like to. We will send the info a few days in advance.
We hope to see you there!
Best,
MOG
Ore Sorting: Changing the economic outlook of hard rock mining with declining head grades and rising production costs
Several factors contribute to an often bleak outlook for mining and mineral processing projects in the current market: rising energy costs, falling ore body head grades, and lower profit margins on added value products have all made it more difficult to operate economically. Ore sorting is a class of technologies that offers potential solutions to these problems by identifying the metal values in a run-of-mine stream and separating the stones containing valuable mineralization from barren stones. This separation reduces the amount of material that must be processed to produce a given amount of value added metal, which has significant impact on the total mine and plant economics. To date, ore sorting has been studied extensively and several technologies have been identified as suitable for industrial application; however, very little quantitative discussion has been made about the impact of these technologies. Dual-energy X-ray transmission has been used to sort ore from different mines, and an analysis identifying the economic impact of these results is presented. Significant energy savings in milling have been realized, and capital and operating cost advantages to using ore sorting have been identified.
Joe is a Project Engineer with Orchard Material Technology, a mineral processing consulting firm in North Andover, MA. OMT brings specific processing knowledge and technology to the refractory and specialty metals industries. We offer comprehensive process design, review, and auditing capabilities to ensure maximal productivity. Joe has been the lead engineer developing ore sorting technologies for the refractory metal industry, studying the applicable technologies and defining the economic impact of bringing ore sorting to market. Before joining OMT, Joe earned his M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering at Tufts University in Medford, MA.
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