The Sustainability of Mining Engineering Education in South Africa

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Created: Thursday, 28 November 2024 07:49

Written by D.F. Malan

The mining engineering departments at the various South African tertiary institutes are responsible for producing the next generation of tech-savvy mining engineers. It is well known that it is an ongoing battle for these departments to attract top students. The problem is not unique to South Africa, however. Mining Digital reported earlier this year that mining is no longer seen as a popular career choice and enrolment in mining engineering courses decreased by 63% in Australia since 2014. The Mining Industry Human Resources Council of Canada found in a survey that 70% of the younger generation said they would not consider a career in mining and this was the highest proportion of all the industries included in the survey. This problem is even more complex in South Africa and addressing it will require a multi-pronged approach.

A major difficulty is that the basic education system is not training enough students in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. Numbers presented to parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Basic Education revealed that enrolment for STEM subjects decreased substantially from 2016 to 2020. During this period, mathematics decreased by 40 385, physical sciences decreased by 18 461 and life sciences decreased by 21 940. It is alarming that the various medical, computer science, engineering and pure science faculties at the tertiary institutes now compete to attract the best from this shrinking pool of STEM matriculants. Mining departments typically fall last in line as the best talent is grabbed by the offerings perceived to be more glamorous by the students. Although exceedingly difficult to implement, STEM subjects should assume a central role in the nation’s public and private education system. Diane Sengati from the African Institute of Mathematical Science (AIMS) noted “Most students don’t pursue STEM subjects because they think it is very difficult, but the perceived difficulties root from how they have been taught those subjects. If you teach the subject in a friendlier way, it becomes easier and attracts more students”. Training the teachers is therefore an important initiative for AIMS and it should be aggressively pursued by the government. James Lees of the Mail & Guardian wrote that the number of schools not offering science subjects increased from 512 in 2013 to 781 in 2021. This trend must be reversed to increase the pool of young talent.

The mining industry can also assist in making mining studies a more attractive option for students. This includes advocating for mining education and the marketing of its importance in schools and universities. Mining can improve its image and make itself a more desirable choice for students by focusing on the adoption of advanced mining equipment and technologies. Of concern is that the number of bursaries awarded by some mining groups has decreased in recent years. Approximately only 30% of the final year class at our university is currently studying with a bursary and this trend must be reversed.

The third aspect affecting the sustainability of mining departments is the sourcing of skilled staff. The requirements to fill lecturing positions at the universities are perhaps unnecessarily strict, and typically a PhD degree is a minimum requirement for a senior lecturer position. Sourcing mining graduates with a PhD, some teaching experience and a good publications record is exceedingly difficult. Finding a suitable professor candidate is the proverbial hen’s teeth. The universities need to be more innovative in this regard and career paths need to be more flexible. The development of younger staff into these roles is becoming more important. Industry can play a supportive role and aspects, such as secondments to industry for practical experience, can be of great assistance. Appointment of senior industry staff in part-time ‘extraordinary’ lecturer and professor positions has also been successfully used in the past and this should be supported by both industry and the tertiary institutes.

D.F. Malan

Special Edition of the Southern African Rare Earths Conference 2024

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Created: Wednesday, 06 November 2024 06:46

Written by E. Matinde

Rare earths elements (REE), often dubbed the ‘vitamins driving the 21st century industrial epoch and clean energy transitions’, have been a subject of debate and are at the centre of the geopolitical and supply-side tensions between China and the West. With everyone scrambling for de-risk of their supply chains, the attention is now increasingly being focused on seeking alternative sources of these critical raw materials. This is where Southern Africa, as a geopolitically neutral region rich in these irreplaceable raw materials, comes in to ensure the sustainable supply of the critical raw materials needed to drive the clean energy transition.

Although the Institute is historically known for its acumen for organizing thought provoking and interesting conferences, nothing would have prepared any reader for the perfect timing to release the special October edition. The special edition of the Journal is unique in that it showcases the Institute’s contribution to the global conundrum on the debate about these critical and strategic raw materials. This special edition contains seven papers that were selected from the 2nd International Conference on Southern African Rare Earths 2024 held in Swakopmund, Namibia. With the theme ‘Global Impact and Sustainable Supply’, the conference focused on fostering dialogue, leveraging on global diversity and innovation in the rare earths sector. The selected papers enhance an understanding of the occurrence and extraction of these vital elements from both conventional, and non-conventional resources, ranging from exploration and geology, characterization and concentration, right up to leaching behaviour, extraction, and recovery from solutions. The diverse nature and scope of the topical issues discussed in the papers included in this special edition highlights both the challenges and opportunities in harnessing the feasibility and economies of scale associated with the recovery of REEs from such complex, and low-grade resources.

E. Matinde
President, SAIMM

Is industry hiding its light under the proverbial bushel?

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Created: Wednesday, 16 October 2024 06:00

Written by R.M.S. Falcon

The SAIMM’s 2024 Annual General Meeting held in August 2024 celebrated the Institute’s 130th birthday and 70 years since the Journal was first published. This celebration comes at a time when the mining industry is facing challenges with regard to future funding and limited opportunities for new developments largely due to environmental lobbying and soaring financial costs.

It is in this context that this Institute has an important role to play. Following on from the Commentary penned by Prof Dick Stacey in the August 2024 edition of this Journal, it is now my pleasure to reverberate the relevance of the Institute as the collective intellectual face of the mining and metallurgical industries and to emphasize the important functions the Institute performs for these industries. Namely, the Institute provides an essential gathering point around which the academic and industrial communities network, share common interests, promote common goals towards advanced knowledge, develop technical professionalism and ensure industry-wide practices with regard to safety, health and environmental matters. The sharing of such goals can only be met through the hosting of networking opportunities which serve to centralize the mechanisms for activities of common interest.

The critical functions that the Institute provides include the hosting of conferences and related events in a wide range of topics, and the production of the Journal – an internationally accredited publication which presents papers highlighting the latest technical advancements of the day, both in southern Africa and globally. It also summarizes past and current advancements by way of valuable and extensive reviews.

Linked to these functions is the fact that the Institute serves two realms of the mining and metallurgical fraternity – industry and academia. Both attend conferences and related events, but generally only those in academia tend to contribute papers to the Journal. Understandably, those active in industry have little time or incentive to spend on non-practical or non-commercial activities, whereas academicians are rewarded well for their efforts in sharing knowledge to as wide a community as possible through an accredited publication.

As Prof Dick Stacey once quoted, “in the mining and metallurgical industries there are regular examples of significant achievements whereby problems have been solved. Publication of the basis of these achievements, and the causes of the problems, could be of considerable value to other companies in the broader mining sphere”. On this basis, Stacey calls for more contributions from the industrial sector.

I too hope that those in industry, namely those at the ‘coal face’, will consider increasing their paper contributions by publishing results of relevant, unusual and successful achievements in the Journal. This would inevitably prove of importance to wider communities both locally and internationally and such publications would be accessible on a global and permanent basis.

One of the incentives to publish industrial mining and metallurgical information is to achieve recognition for such information, which in turn leads to ensuring the advancement of practices in the relevant industries. Recognition is manifested by the Institute through the awarding of gold and silver medals to papers of outstanding significance and value. Medals for such papers are awarded annually on the occasion of the Institute’s August AGM.

I often wonder whether those in the general mining and metallurgical communities actually read and appreciate the relevance of high-value papers and the impact that such information can have on their sectors. Allow me to summarize two such examples.

The most recent paper to be awarded a gold medal at the 2024 AGM was co-authored by Prof Francois Malan and Prof John Napier from the University of Pretoria working in tandem with the platinum industry. In this case, the paper was entitled ‘Numerical simulation of large-scale pillar layouts’ with particular reference to platinum mining. The purpose of the paper was to outline an efficient numerical strategy that can be used to assess large-scale pillar layout performance while retaining the ability to modify individual pillar constitutive behaviour. Although computational solution techniques are impressive, a major difficulty had been encountered in assigning suitable material properties to the pillars and in devising information of the layered rock strata overlying the mine excavations. The proposed method is applied to compare estimated average pillar stress values against values determined by detailed modelling and against observed behaviour. Such information has undoubted significance in terms of efficiency, safety and cost for the platinum mining industry.

A second paper, penned by Prof Josias van der Merwe (sadly recently deceased) working in collaboration with Eskom, was awarded a silver medal in 2021. Entitled ‘Investigation of the mechanism for fireside corrosion in coal-fired boilers in South Africa’, this paper presented the underlying causes leading to the coal fleet’s chronic boiler-tube failures. The consequences of such failures have played a major role in load shedding thereby contributing significantly to the slowing of industrial growth and techno-economic development in South Africa.

As highlighted by Neil Stacey in his Ground Up editorial in December 2022, this latter paper presented far more fundamental and previously unknown reasons for the failure rate of metal in Eskom’s boilers. In effect, the impact of sub-standard coal – coal running at 2% sulfur, a value well above the specification of 1.3% – along with low oxygen partial pressures (to keep NOx levels down) – have created conditions that promote the formation of iron sulfides (FeS), a brittle metal. This component compromises the strength of the boiler tubes which then fail in the harsh environment of Eskom’s boilers, thereby resulting in stoppages. This has led to significant load shedding with major impacts on every sector across the country.

I hope that these examples provide impetus for those in the mining and metallurgical industries to expand their roles in publishing papers of technical significance in the SAIMM Journal.

It is against this background that topic-themed editions of the SAIMM Journal have now been introduced and will be published between general-paper editions. This will hopefully ensure even more contributions and from wider sources across the academic, technical, industrial and professional sectors in future, thereby leading to further knowledge-sharing across the mining and metallurgical industries – both in this country and abroad.

R.M.S. Falcon
SAIMM Publications Editor

ESG and finding tools to help ‘think about things differently’

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Created: Monday, 09 September 2024 13:30

Written by G.L. Smith

I have always been fascinated by how things work, and my mother often commented that I got more pleasure from pulling my toys apart and rebuilding them than from playing with them. Learning, or should I say ‘trying to understand how things work, why they work, and then how to do it differently’ is an ongoing passion for me. The Why, How and What If may have driven my family crazy at times but they are questions that have shaped my life.

A key learning has been that if you look at a problem the same way (with the same biases!) you are likely to come up with the same solution (or perhaps a slight variant). So, to find a new solution you must look at a problem differently, from an alternative perspective. This needs to be a conscious, intentional process requiring others’ perspectives, experiences, and competencies - not just your own. Another learning is that to solve challenges we need a thinking framework, a logic construct - a ‘tool’. It has been said that a key evolutionary step in the journey to being Homo Sapiens was the use of tools My grandchildren tease me, as I so often say to them, ‘The most powerful part of your body is your brain – use it first’.

Currently I am on a journey to better understand how we could, as an industry, move from seeing ESG (environmental, social, governance) as a burden, to being a strategic enabler by changing the ‘how I see the problem’ to be able to create a new solution; while the ‘tool’ that I’m finding most useful is that of systems thinking, specifically complex adaptive systems and industrial ecology.

Moving into a little bit of theory: complex systems are systems, comprising multiple parts that may interact and whose behaviour is intrinsically difficult to model due to the dependencies, competition, relationships, or other types of interactions between their parts or between a given system and its environment over both time and location. Systems that are ‘complex’ have distinct properties that arise from these relationships that lead to collective behaviours and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment. Complex systems can be understood as an alternative paradigm to reductionism, which attempts to explain systems in terms of their constituent parts and the individual interactions between them. An adaptive system, or complex adaptive system, is a special case of complex systems, which can adapt its behaviour according to changes in its environment or in parts of the system itself. In this way, the system can improve its performance through a continuing interaction with its environment over time.

Industrial ecology is the study of systemic relationships between society, the economy, and the natural environment. It focuses on the use of technology to reduce environmental impacts and reconcile human development with environmental stewardship while recognizing the importance of socioeconomic factors in achieving these goals viz. sustainability, which is the goal of ESG.

So, I’ve come to a simple but profound realization: that critical shift in perspective that reshapes the pool of possible solutions. We must acknowledge that mining is a complex adaptive system, an industrial ecology, with both a temporal and spatial impact on society, environment and economy, if we are to achieve industry sustainability for the generations to come.

The thought I would like to leave you with is that I firmly believe that we as professionals should revisit our business strategies based on an industrial ecology logic and build solutions that consider the interacting components as parts of a complex adaptive system, to develop sustainability and obtain enduring social licence to operate.

G.L. Smith Pr Eng PhD
SAIMM Honorary Life Fellow & Past President

Value provided by the Institute

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Created: Thursday, 08 August 2024 07:08

Written by T.R. Stacey

This year the SAIMM will celebrate its 130th ‘birthday’. In this commentary I would like to focus on the value and service that the Institute has provided to the mining and metallurgical industries.

The SAIMM is a very valuable medium through which members in industry, academics, and researchers can interact with others in seminars and conferences, and through publication in the Journal. These conferences and publications have often focused on Southern African conditions and operations, but numerous international conferences have also been hosted. Such conferences provide opportunity for informal exchange of information between delegates, which adds value beyond that of the published proceedings. The proceedings of the more recent conferences (in the electronic era) are all open access, and it is expected that soon they will be searchable online by keywords. This will make many practical papers readily available. The Journal is also open access, and papers can be easily retrieved through an online search. The Journal has recently been attracting a significant number of contributions from other countries. In the current era in which access to international journals is costly, and many open access journals charge authors for publication, the Institute can be very proud of the fact that it provides the free, open access service to all, and hence value to the mining and metallurgical industries. I would now like to focus further on publication ‘value’.

In his paper ‘Journal impact factors – the good, the bad and the ugly’ in the September 2022 issue of the SAIMM Journal, Professor Francois Malan questioned the value of journal impact factors and numbers of citations as a measure of research excellence. He indicated that there is a growing movement towards an alternative approach. Numbers of citations, and thus impact factors, are open to manipulation by researchers and research organizations to ‘demonstrate’ research excellence. However, there is a significant difference between numbers of citations (often manipulated) and numbers of influential citations. As an example, an academic colleague of mine was invited to co-author a paper to which he had provided editing input. Based on some 200 citations, this proved to be his ‘best’ paper, but it only achieved a single ‘influential’ citation. A citation in a paper that deals with the cited information in some detail is an influential one, rather than a citation that just appears, with no further ‘use’ of its content. I suggest that the value created by a paper would be a significantly better measure of research excellence than citations or impact factors.
In engineering, and particularly in the mining and metallurgical sphere, operators will frequently make use of published information for the benefit of their operation but will rarely prepare any paper in which they would cite that information. Therefore, they have gained value from the published information, and perhaps this is a much better measure of research excellence than citations. In this context ‘value’ has many meanings. It can be financial: for example, a student of mine described a case in which additional geotechnical investigation yielded a projected financial benefit of 70 times the cost of the investigations; but perhaps more importantly it will include ‘benefit to the world values’ such as health and safety, social, environmental, humanitarian, and ecological values.

In the mining and metallurgical industries there are regular examples of significant achievements and problems. Publication of the bases of the achievements, and the causes of the problems, could be of considerable value to other companies in the broader mining sphere and thus create value in general. By way of contrast, an academic publication in an area of scientific interest may achieve many academic citations but provide no real value to the mining and metallurgical industries.
Both industry and research personnel are therefore encouraged to publish solutions to problems and explanations of problems, and thus create value for the benefit of the industry at large. Perhaps mining companies should quantify the value that they aim for in relative terms – for example, to be in the upper quartile regarding safety, to be in the upper quartile regarding environmental control, or to be in the lower quartile of the cost curve. This would give researchers and operators guidelines against which to measure the value of their publications.

There are relatively few mining-related journals published in the world, and the Institute and its members can be proud that our Journal, which has now been in publication for 70 years, is one of those and is internationally recognized. The SAIMM Journal grew out of that of the Chemical Metallurgical and Mining Society of South Africa, which began publication in about 1900. Thus, we can also be proud that the SAIMM has been providing service and value to our own industries and those in other countries for 130 years now. I trust it will continue to do so for many years in the future.

T.R. Stacey

Wonders of New Age Technology

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Created: Wednesday, 10 July 2024 09:42

Written by M.W. Erwee

If you’re bored, it’s probably your own fault. When I was a first-year student in 2002, I was exceptionally shy and introverted, like many of my engineering student friends. I grew up with technology and was one of the first among my peers to sacrifice a bit of hard-earned internet-café job money (intended for a few on-campus treats at Steers) to buy a USB flash drive. I would crawl under computer laboratory desks to find the USB port to plug it in, much to the amusement of my peers who were still using floppy disks. Six months later, there were extension cables on the tables to plug in your ‘stick’. Google and Wikipedia were novelties, and search engines like Yahoo and Alta Vista were considered great for starting an internet search. The library computers and staff were invaluable for finding relevant information on all subjects.

I was not suffering, nor was I unhappy, because there were very few modern tools available for any kind of ‘instant solution’ to a problem. Learning was by discovery and, to a large degree, it gave me great satisfaction. It just took lots of time, and when I was frustrated, getting help was not as simple as ‘googling’ it. Nor was it easy for me to approach my lecturers (who were all great, by the way) because I was simply too shy. I’ve come out of my shell since.

As I read through the abstracts for this month’s edition of the journal, I was again amazed by how far we’ve come as a human race in leveraging technology to our advantage. This month’s edition features a particular paper based on a master’s degree project in mining engineering that piqued my interest. Within seconds, I could open the dissertation online and read all about it. As a Xennial, a cross between Generation X and Millennial, I deeply appreciate the ability to instantly access information. I am reminded of a quote from The History Boys, in which the eccentric Mr. Hector says, ‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours’.

Those moments come when I read papers and explore new things. This keeps me hopeful that we have a bright future, despite our challenges as an industry. We have gargantuan sets of data to explore, centuries of knowledge at our fingertips, and free tools to leverage all of this to our advantage.

You simply can’t be bored or out of ideas. If you are, it’s probably your own fault. When in doubt, Google it, watch a YouTube tutorial, or ask ChatGPT for some ideas. Also, invite a young person for coffee—they’ll help you more than you might expect!

M.W. Erwee
Pyrometallurgist

Unrecognized - potential wealth where least expected

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Created: Monday, 10 June 2024 08:33

Written by H. Lodewijks

There has been a lot of talk lately about the just energy transition and critical minerals. Southern Africa is richly endowed with critical minerals and as such should play an important role in the journey towards renewable energy. And then there is coal. Inevitably, decarbonization will entail the phasing out of coal as an energy source. However, a just energy transition requires more than simply shutting down coal mines and power plants. Coal mining communities often rely heavily on the industry for their jobs and livelihoods. As coal use declines, these communities will require robust social safety nets and reskilling programmes to ensure a smooth transition into new sectors of the growing clean energy economy. Areas for consideration might include alternative applications for, and products from, coal such as carbon fibre, which has applications in motor vehicles, wind turbines and energy equipment, sports items, electronic, military, defence, and medical products. Another example is coal use in building materials, some made with carbon fibres and others with carbon char. include coal plastics, coal foam, and graphene-based building materials. Graphene is an important single-layered carbon product which is light and extremely strong. It is currently emerging as a vital product with many applications including manufacturing, vehicles, aircraft, space travel, and electronics. Other alternative products from coal are activated carbon and carbon black. Coal and coal discard may turn out to be viable sources of rare earth elements, which are also of critical importance to the decarbonization journey. As this journey progresses and as is seen elsewhere in the world, the future of coal may lie in its perceived role as one of the most important elemental, mineral, and ore commodities that a country can possess. For any of the above to materialize will require extensive research and development. And even then, only a few of these visions may come to fruition. However, to do nothing is not an option. I wish you a pleasant reading experience.

H. Lodewijks
Coaltech Research Association

From the Desktop to the Coal Face

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Created: Sunday, 19 May 2024 15:32

Written by J.N. van der Merwe

I thought to write this note as a researcher, author, and collaborator, and who, over a few decades has seen and participated in the development of several new equations, procedures, and processes on a number of topics: in my case, obviously in the field of rock engineering. These are invariably published in established journals or presented at conferences of some or other form, some more formal than others.

One of my worst nightmares is that practitioners in the field will see new equations or procedures and simply apply them without having gone through the proper preparatory steps and investigations.

What is often not realized is that a journal or conference paper is no more than the briefest of summaries of work that was often done over a long time period, sometimes by numerous researchers. The background preconditions and limitations are often implied—not even always, but not explicitly stated in paper publications.
A paper can only be of a certain length and there is simply not space to include everything. Just a simple example is a paper based on a doctoral thesis. The thesis itself may vary in length from 200 to 400 pages, but the published paper based on it, not more than 10 or 12 pages. It is totally impractical for everything that was stated or found in an investigation report to make its way into a paper for general consumption: only the highlights of the outcomes can be published in the popular domain.

There may be errors in the paper, in the form of misprints or other errors, that were simply not identified during the refereeing process. Referees, as well as authors, are just people and mistakes can happen.

It is even possible, albeit not likely, for fundamental errors in thinking in the original reporting or experimental phase that, at the time of writing or refereeing, were overshadowed by other more convincing-sounding arguments. There could be errors in the data and, often, the data may be incomplete.

Always remember that any new equation derived from experimentation or data analysis for anything is no more than a theory. In essence, it is a description of what the developer saw—or believed they saw—in the data, be it in the form of numbers or any other type of observation. But as long as it is on paper, it is no more than a theory.

It is against this background that I want to stress the point that any new process or design equation cannot simply be put into practice. No. This should never be done without careful consideration and evaluation of the local context.

Theory should not just blindly be put into practice. It is not a step from theory to practice: it is a process, and the process should be carefully planned and managed.

We have to progress and new processes have to be applied. Without incremental improvement, nothing will change. If we prefer to wait for perfection, it will never come. We would still have been mining with hammers and chisels.

Just one example of an error in the application from theory to practise is a lesson from a tragic mine-collapse disaster half a century ago that we may have missed or simply not heeded, and which can serve as illustration. At the time, the mine was in need of increased coal production, but the predevelopment to unlock new reserves was not yet in place. Consideration was then given to mining the coal in the roof in areas that had previously been mined at a nominal height of 3 m: this in a 6 m thick coal seam. The coal was already exposed, the infrastructure was in place. The solution made perfect sense.

There was no formal design procedure for coal pillars at the time, but warnings were issued that increasing the pillar height would weaken the pillars and could possibly result in failure. It was not known at the time by how much the pillars would be weakened, if at all.
The mine did not simply go ahead and increase the pillar height. They took the responsible precaution of embarking on an experiment. The height was increased in an experimental area and visually observed. After about three months, nothing had changed and no collapse occurred. The experiment was regarded as successful and so the coal roof was mined in several areas. Then the collapse occurred.

So what went wrong?

Firstly, the effects of time on pillar scaling and subsequent reduction in pillar width were not known or appreciated. In retrospect, and only in retrospect, three months was too short a time for the experiment, particularly as no formal measurements were reported, if at all performed.
Secondly, the experimental area was small and surrounded by solid coal on all sides. The effect of scale and increased pillar load due to the greater expanse of mining was not known at the time.

Thirdly, no follow-up monitoring or continued observation of the experimental area was done.

This is just a very brief description of hasty application of what, at the time, could be considered as a theory: Increased height would not substantially reduce pillar strength. This was the theory, believed to have been backed up by experiment.

Several other contributary events took place before the major collapse occurred. The brief description here is just to illustrate the point that any change in an existing situation has to be carefully implemented and properly analysed.

It also serves to illustrate another vitally important omission in our current mining operations, a point that has been stressed so often by researchers like Prof Francois Malan of the University of Pretoria; namely, that we do not do anything remotely close to enough measurements in our mining operations.

So, my plea is this: don’t just scan a paper until you find an equation that suits your needs and go ahead with implementation. Study the paper, get more information, consider the background against which the paper was written, and then plan implementation very carefully and slowly.

Perform measurements. Have a suitable control area for comparison, measure and continue monitoring, and especially continue with the observations in the control area. Adapt if necessary.

Also bear in mind that equations reflect the ideal situation. In the case of bord-and-pillar mining, for instance, this means assuming a constant mining height and perfectly straight roadways. No off-line development, equipment in perfection condition, so perfectly constant and equal traction on cat tracks, etc. No errors in the placement or observation of survey pegs. No simple human error.
But we all know that reality is different.

Therefore, there also has to be some form of allowance for real mining practice. There cannot be universal guidelines for this because the degree of deviation will be different for different mines, and even different sections on a particular mine. The practical allowance for error will depend on the on-site extent of deviations.

Build up confidence, think, observe, think again before you do final implementation—and only then go ahead. And even then, continue monitoring. We have to progress, but we have to do so very carefully.

J.N. van der Merwe

The relentless march of Moore’s law

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Created: Wednesday, 17 April 2024 13:24

Written by Q.G. Reynolds

This special edition of the Journal showcases recent work in metallurgical applications of computational modelling. But what exactly is computational modelling? Historically this would have included any science or engineering problem that required a computer to solve numerical approximations of the governing equations. Computers were typically large, expensive pieces of equipment, and the problems solved were limited by the available power of the machine – early applications included chemical thermodynamics, numerical heat and mass transfer, and simple problems in fluid flow.

However, in modern times we have computing pervading our lives to an ever-increasing degree, and we are starting to catch more unusual fish in our computational modelling nets. Driven by sustained exponential growth in computer power over more than six decades (your wristwatch today has more capability than was available to the entire Apollo space programme), methods such as computational fluid dynamics have been enhanced beyond all recognition and are now capable of modelling realistic engineering problems with multiphase flow and free surface interfaces, coupled heat transfer, electromagnetic fields, and others. Tools like massively-parallel GPU accelerators are also breathing new life into old methods like discrete element modelling, giving us unprecedented insight into particulate flow problems.

Alongside the rapid growth in capability and performance of traditional computational modelling tools, the role of such models in the knowledge industry has also evolved. From being able to give an isolated (and usually not very accurate) result, they are now routinely used to study the general behaviour of systems across wide ranges of their parameter spaces. Such models are also increasingly viewed as intermediate analysis and interpretation tools for building intuition rather than producing the ‘final answer’, and they generate one thing that is in short supply in metallurgical processes – data. And since data feeds the physics-informed or data-driven reduced order models which power the ongoing revolution in artificial intelligence, computational modelling will remain a useful piece of the puzzle for a long time to come.

Q.G. Reynolds
Pyrometallurgy Division, Mintek
Chemical Engineering Department, Stellenbosch University

Ticking boxes won’t revive the mining industry

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Created: Wednesday, 13 March 2024 09:46

Written by I. Robinson

The mining industry, which has been the engine of growth of the South African economy for about 150 years, has stalled. Commodity prices have plunged and production costs risen as the infrastructure within which the mines operate has deteriorated. Production is restricted by erratic power supplies and exports are throttled by Transnet’s lack of capacity and problems at the ports. Mining companies have to spend vast sums both to protect their assets and for personal security. There are few new projects and exploration has dwindled to nearly zero. Beneficiation has moved backwards as more chrome and manganese ore is being exported and less is smelted domestically to produce alloys.

In late February Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) announced that it had initiated a Section 189A process that would result in the retrenchment of 3 700 employees. This followed Arcelor Mittal’s (Amsa’s) threat to close facilities at its Newcastle and Vanderbijlpark steel plants which would involve the loss of 3 500 jobs. Amsa blamed their problems largely on factors beyond their control, citing Transnet’s inability to provide an efficient rail transport service and the erratic supply and high cost of electricity.

Amsa also reported that steel demand had collapsed under the weight of a sluggish economy and a failing state, with the country’s apparent steel consumption declining by 20% over the last seven years to an annual level of about 4 million tons. As demand for steel is a key indicator of industrialization this shows that South Africa has deindustrialized over the last decade.

However, President Ramaphosa struck an upbeat note at the Mining Indaba in Cape Town when he announced that 39% of the South African mining industry is now owned by blacks and the audience responded with rapturous applause. Did that mean that ownership of the industry has now been expanded to a much larger number of blacks or simply that a few wealthy individuals have gained a larger share of the industry? If expansion in black ownership does not equate to an increase in benefits and prosperity for the wider black community then calculating ownership figures according to race is a mere box-ticking exercise.

It also raises the question of foreign ownership. Perhaps the architects of this ownership-by-race analysis could also inform the South African public of the percentage of our mining industry controlled by foreign companies. It would be interesting to know what proportion of the South African mining industry belongs to the Chinese through their ownership of chrome ore and alloy producer Samancor. Or the Russian oligarchs through their involvement in the production of manganese ore and alloys? Or the British through Anglo American? Are these figures available?

Furthermore, foreign owned companies like Samancor and Acerinox, the Spanish company that owns Columbus Stainless Steel, which are not listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) deny South African citizens of all races any possibility of ownership of projects in their own country.

Evidently not prepared to face up to the really important problems facing the mining industry, MP Sylvia Lucas flippantly remarked during the State of the Nation (SONA) debate in Parliament that load-shedding was not ‘the end of the world’. Perhaps not, but certainly the cause of billions of rands in damage to the national economy.

Also during this debate, the Minister of Mines, Gwede Mantashe proudly asserted the government’s control of the mining industry, saying that ANC cadre deployment would continue and the ANC will continue to deploy ‘capable’ cadres because the party has brought about racial transformation. This may be so but he also needs to ask himself why the South African mining industry over which he presides was rated in May last year for the second time by the prestigious Fraser Institute in Vancouver, Canada, as one of the world’s ten worst destinations for mining investment.

I. Robinson