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Geometallurgy: Metal Concentration, Recovery & Refinement

February 27, 2024

To close out our series on geometallurgy, we are presenting an overview on some highly complex topics that contain a lot of underlying thermodynamics and kinetics (we are unfortunately not going to get super deep into this here), both of…

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Geometallurgy: Comminution

February 6, 2024

Comminution is simply the size reduction of particles, and its purpose is to liberate valuable minerals from waste prior to concentration. The product is a mixture of particles that contain the valuable mineral (i.e., ore), gangue minerals (i.e., the commercially…

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Geometallurgy: Texture

January 23, 2024

A key aspect of geometallurgy is understanding what is the relationship of the mineral(s) of interest to all other minerals? What is texture? The characterization of mineral texture is a major concern for process mineralogists, as liberation characteristics of ore…

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Geometallurgy: Deportment

November 6, 2023

More than anything when I first heard about deportment, I liked the word, but I knew nothing about it. Therefore, my natural next step was to ask questions, read some papers, and generally learn more about it. The first thing…

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Geometallurgy: Penalties and Credits

October 24, 2023

Blog miniseries along common themes are the best! Through the end of 2023 we are going to dive into geometallurgy from a geochemistry-adjacent perspective (keeping it simple, keeping it relevant, and hoping every geoscientist learns one small thing per blog).…

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A diagram of light photons and their reflection.

The fathers of spectroscopy, a series: Albert Einstein

August 24, 2023

We started off this series with a glass prism and the creation of the visible spectrum (Herschel) and since progressed through theories of light behaving as a wave and light (Maxwell) behaving as a particle (Planck). Now, let’s conclude our…

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The fathers of spectroscopy, a series: Max Planck

August 9, 2023

Of the many substantial contributions to theoretical physics, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck’s fame rests heavily on his role as the originator of quantum theory, which revolutionized human understanding (and Marvel movie subplots) of atomic and subatomic processes. The discovery…

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The fathers of spectroscopy, a series: James Clerk Maxwell

July 5, 2023

Last post we covered the foundation for which spectroscopy was built, the work of Sir William Herschel, who discovered the infrared through his experiments. Continuing our journey, James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish mathematician and scientist responsible for the classical…

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The fathers of spectroscopy, a series: Sir William Herschel

June 26, 2023

Spectroscopy is the study of the absorption, reflectance, and emission of electromagnetic radiation (e.g., light) by matter, measured as a function of wavelength (or frequency). It is used as a tool for characterizing the structures of atoms and molecules by…

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Orientation Survey: pXRF

January 25, 2023

pXRF has many applications both within and outside of mining and mineral exploration. In no industry has a vendor ever told a client to take the pXRF, point, shoot, and voilà – you now have a robust dataset that is…

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