100 Innovations in the Mining Industry

ORE PROCESSING: Free Download    Innovation Book

Modular Plant - 67 page

Ore Grinding Monitoring - 66 page
Sonar Flowmeter - 64 page
Underground 

Preconcentration  - 65 page

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MINING INNOVATIONS Industrial innovation was born largely from the mining sector, and history is full of noteworthy examples. Environmental regulations can be traced back to Spain’s Almadén mercury mine in the seventeenth century. Not long after, Thomas Newcomen designed the first steam engine in the early eighteenth century to draw water from tin mines in Cornwall. Setting out to improve the limited effectiveness of Newcomen’s pump, James Watt, a technician at the University of Glasgow, invented the condensation chamber, thereby making a fortune with his friend Matthew Boulton. In 1784, the two associates patented the steam locomotive to move mined ore, and when the first locomotives hit the market twenty years later, they quickly left the underground coal mines for a breath of fresh air! Boulton and Watt’s mining invention was even used to automate the manufacture of textiles and thus revolutionize the clothing industry. The safety lamp made its debut in 1815, only slightly before the North American mining booms for copper in Michigan (1840–1843) and for gold in California (1848) and Colorado (1858). In 1867, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, which also found an early application in the world of mining! The expanding market for metals at the beginning of the twentieth century required new production and processing methods, paving the way for advances in the field of metallurgy. Electrolytic processes to refine aluminum and, later, copper were perfected just twenty years after the advent of Gramme’s dynamo; these processes are still in use today to purify metals. Flotation, the most effective method of separating minerals from the gangue, or the barren parts of mined ore, emerged in Broken Hill, Australia, in 1903, and rapidly spread throughout the world.

Mining techniques are the Formula- One race cars of the industry: devised for a difficult and competitive world, they are at the cutting edge of new ideas and represent the testing ground for larger-scale applications.