MINTEK – MINTEK

The institute that is now MINTEK was established in 1934 by an act of the South African parliament to provide a research body to support the South African minerals industry. Before adopting the name MINTEK, it was previously known as the Government Metallurgical Laboratory (GML), National Institute for Metallurgy (NIM) and the Institute for Minerals Technology. MINTEK is an affiliate member of the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (SAIMM), which has reciprocal agreements with international conferencing agencies including BDT, CIM and PDAC (Canada), Mines and Money Asia, MiningWorld (Russia), Molten (Korea), EMPRC (Germany), MassMin (Chile) and IMPC (multi-national).

MINTEK houses several research departments, those relevant to the tasks in this proposal include Hydrometallurgy, Minerals Processing, Measurement and Control and Mineralogy. Electronic copies of the reports on all investigations ever done over the past 86 years remain available to the MINTEK researchers as keyword-searchable documents, representing a massive historic knowledge base on the chemical, mineralogical, hydro/pyro/bio/physical-metallurgical and techno-economical aspects of minerals processing. MINTEK contributes to all parts of the value chain from after the haulage of ore from the mine, including comminution, ore sorting, classification, concentration, leaching, winning from solution (IX, SX, EW, precipitation), smelting (notably DC-arc smelting of fines) and advanced instrumentation and control (ex. multi-variable milling and flotation circuits, furnace electrode positioning and phase-balance control etc.).

Role: Developer of Models for crushing and screening optimisation within KTA2, Pilot in HOLCIM’s Pilot #3; International cooperation with Africa; Participation in social acceptance, dissemination, clustering, communication, interaction with policy makers.

www.mintek.co.za