Journal Comment
A monthly publication devoted to scientific transactions and specialist technical topics is unlikely to be on the priority reading list of the majority of the mining and metallurgical community. But it is the ambition of the Publication's Committee to make the Journal of much wider interest to our general membership from technician trainees to mine managers to CEO's of our constituent companies. It is to entice general readership that some 1200 words of valuable space are devoted to the Journal Comment each month. This is intended to highlight some of the features and impact of the papers to excite and activate attention.
To entice this preliminary glance before confining the publication to the book shelf or even the wpb, the author has to call on a large measure of journalistic licence in style, titles and quotations. It is essential to be spicy, controversial and even provocative to separate it from the abbreviated authoritative but necessary scientific style of the bulk of the contents.
The Journal Comment aims to be an enticement to dig into some important feature of the papers in the issue. For this reason it has been decided to include it as a separate item on the Institutes Web Site. This might provoke those who enjoy twittering, blogging and googling to submit comment and criticism, all of which will be welcomed and responded to. At least it is proof that somebody has read it.
R.E. Robinson
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Created: Saturday, 01 November 2014 00:00
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Written by I Watson
The SAIMM held its first Mining, the Environment and Society conference in November 2013. The theme of this conference was ‘Issues and Responses’. Over the two days, 21 papers highlighted the range of social and environmental issues associated with mining and how the sector is responding, or could respond, to them. A number of papers in this edition of the Journal have been selected from the conference.
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Created: Monday, 01 December 2014 21:37
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Written by RCW Webber-Youngman
If it was not for the vision of the founder member of the Society of Mining Professors, Professor Günter Fettweis, the International Society of Mining Professors would not have been possible as it stands today. A group of mining professors under the guidance of Professor Fettweiss gathered on 21 October 1990 at the Montanuniversität in Leoben, Austria to establish the Society of Mining Professors.
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Created: Wednesday, 01 October 2014 00:00
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Written by W Joughin
The papers in this issue of the Journal have been selected from the Sixth South African Rock Engineering Symposium (SARES 2014), which was jointly organized by the South African National Institute of Rock Engineering (SANIRE) and the SAIMM. The theme of this symposium, ‘Creating Value through Innovative Rock Engineering’, was selected due to the recent global market changes and other challenges facing the mining industry. Mining needs to become still safer and more efficient while addressing the challenges of rising costs, skills shortages, marginal ore, complex geology, and greater mining depth. Innovative rock engineering design is therefore essential for the future of the mining industry.
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Created: Tuesday, 01 July 2014 00:00
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Written by M Dworzanowski
Physical Beneficiation 2013 was the third conference of its kind, the first being the DMS and Gravity Concentration Conference held in 2006 and the second the Physical Beneficiation 2010 Conference. Physical beneficiation covers dense medium separation (DMS), gravity concentration, magnetic separation, electrostatic separation, and ore sorting –all processes that are widely used in the Southern African mining industry. A total of 22 papers were presented during the two days of the conference, 19 and 20 November 2013, and covered a wide range of commodities and unit processes within the physical beneficiation field. Two keynote addresses set the stage for each day, with Lionel Falcon and Will Blair sharing their vast knowledge and experience in coal processing and DMS respectively. This issue of the Journal features 10 of the papers that were presented at this conference.
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Created: Sunday, 01 June 2014 00:00
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Written by R Paul
When I first read the abstracts of the six papers appearing in the Journal this month, I thought that I would have to comment on each paper individually and in depth, as there did not seem to be a common theme linking them in any way. What do you think: CFD modelling of ventilation patterns in mines, sublevel stope optimization, the indexing of mining risk, controlling fires in coal mines, process for treating vanadium titano-magnetites, and erosion of the freeze lining in submerged-arc furnaces?
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Created: Thursday, 01 May 2014 00:00
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Written by P Smith
The 7th Southern African Base Metals Conference was held in Mpumalanga from 2 to 3 September 2013, with a visit to Nkomati Nickel Mine on 3 September. The Conference attracted 22 papers from sub-Saharan Africa (DRC, Zambia, Namibia, and South Africa) as well as from Finland and Australia. The scope of the papers was wide-ranging, including geology, engineering design, and process metallurgy. This edition of the SAIMM Journal includes a selection of four papers from the conference. It is regrettable that four papers were withdrawn from publication for a variety of reasons at the request of the authors.
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Created: Tuesday, 01 April 2014 00:00
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Written by H Phillips
The papers in this edition of the Journal are authored or co-authored by recent graduates in mining and metallurgy. They are based on final year undergraduate projects and were presented at the annual Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy’s Student Colloquium in November 2013. This was held at the University of Johannesburg, and for the first time a student from Namibia presented a paper.
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Created: Saturday, 01 February 2014 00:00
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Written by G Pattrick
South Africa has a rich resource in precious metals and other minerals and metals and has certainly used this to its benefit in the creation of great wealth and the provision of a substantial number of jobs for its citizens and those of neighbouring states. The question, though, is can more benefit be derived from this mineral wealth?
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Created: Wednesday, 01 January 2014 00:00
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Written by H Bartlett
In this edition of the Journal a selection of the papers given at the conference ‘Sampling and Analysis: Best Practice in African mining’, held in Johannesburg from 4–6 June 2013, is presented.
The main objective of the conference was for the companies that are involved in the African mineral industry to present the procedures that they use for sampling and analysis, from exploration through face sampling and grade control to their processing plants and the final products that are sent to market.
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Created: Sunday, 01 December 2013 00:00
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Written by RE Robinson
‘What have I done to achieve longevity? Woken up each morning and tried to remember not to wear my hearing aid in the bath Robert Morley, 1908–1992
The papers in this issue cover a variety of topics from a number of contributors with no common theme such as a conference topic. To provide some coherent interest, I have chosen a theme inspired by a review paper from Finland which can be related to almost all of the papers. This is ‘A review of real-time optimization in underground mining production’ by Z. Song et al. of the School of Engineering at Aalto University.
