INTERNATIONAL MINING HALL OF FAME
Celebrating the innovators
John Chadwick looks in detail at those who were chosen by our panel of judges around the world for induction in 2015
Francisco Castaño Jr at a Geometrica construction site
Unfortunately the severe global depression in the industry precluded a celebration of the 2015 inductees as had originally been planned for the week of the SME Annual Conference in Phoenix in February. However, they will be celebrated, along with the 2016 inductees at a celebration dinner in Denver, during SME week next February, with Hatch as the lead sponsor.
Francisco Castaño Sr and his son, Francisco Castaño, the current CEO of the company his father started, Geometrica, are the 2015 Bulk Handling inductees. For almost a quarter of a century, Geometrica has built strong, energyefficient structures around the globe. Its expertise is due, in large part, to the pioneers of gridshell technology; among them Castaño Sr.
Francisco Castaño Sr
He was the first to realise the potential for free form and long span in gridshell design. Geometrica domes, barrel vaults and long span structures have taken gridshell technology to new heights all over the globe, thanks to his pioneering efforts.
Ideal for ore, mineral ore concentrate stockpiles, the Freedome ®— Geometrica ' s trademarked free-style dome, as circular structures, may have lamella, Lace™ or Sol™ insurface patterns and single or double grid layers.
But these structures can also be designed with a non-circular plan, bringing complete design freedom to engineers the world over. Using the inherent strength of doubly curved surfaces, Freedomes can clear spans up to 300 m on any terrain, including brutal mountainside slopes or areas with an irregular shape requiring a nonconventional enclosure.
Fred Bond is the posthumous 2015 inductee in Comminution. The word Bond is synonymous with grinding circuit design, e. g. Bond Grindability and Bond Work Index. His work on circuit design occurred from the late 1930s to the mid 1960s and it changed the method of design completely. In the pre-Bond era the prediction of the power required per tonne to grind material to a known product size was based on experience and judgment, in the post Bond era the method of prediction had become engineering practice which was based on measurement and calculation. Bond’ s work defined the relationship between ore hardness, tonnage processed, size reduction achieved and power required. It set the standard for circuit design in the 1950s and it is widely used today, although modifications have been made to handle the large increases which have occurred in mill sizes, feed sizes and feed rates.
During the late 1930s and the 1940s he studied the relationship between energy and size reduction and in 1952 he proposed a“ Third” theory of comminution to define this relationship. Rittinger and Kick had proposed the first two. To apply it he defined“ Work Index”( Wi) for an ore as the specific energy( kWh / t) required to reduce the ore from infinite grain size to 100 µ m and he showed
Fred Bond at work
that for any ore the Work Index can be calculated from plant data and determined in a laboratory test.
Fittingly, elsewhere in this issue there is an article on gravity separation and ore sorting. Sandy Gray, Technical Director and co-founder of Gekko Systems, the Concentration inductee, has made significant contributions in this field. He has offered the industry a platform that maximises the recovery of minerals by using new developments alongside more conventional processing equipment. These developments can be used to eliminate waste and create a highgrade stream of concentrate from which minerals are extracted by gravity separation, or intensive cyanidation. Both methods provide simple, economical, and environmentally responsible means of recovering a range of minerals.
Gray’ s expertise in mineral processing is evident in his ability to design a range of innovative, state-of-the-art, step-change mineral processing flowsheets. The range of patented equipment includes; InLine Pressure Jig, InLine Leach Reactor, Python Modular Plant, and G-Rex Resin Column. These not only set new standards in design, fabrication and efficiency, but also in improved economic, environmental, and
8 International Mining | MAY 2016