Development of a methodology to relate primary breakage properties to its mineralogical & textural characteristics

Pia Lois-Morales, a Geologist from Chile, is a current PhD candidate at the Sustainable Minerals Institute’s JKMRC.  Before joining SMI, Pia completed her MSc where she defined flotation domains for Escondida mine, through the integration of mineralogical, geochemical and processing parameters. In addition, Pia worked as a Geomet consultant in Chile for 2 years, in diverse projects from comminution to tailings deposition.  Pia is passionate about understanding what are the geological controls that influence processing behaviour and believes that more fundamental research will lead to a better integration of geological information into processing prediction.

Increasing complexity of ore deposits requires better prediction of comminution properties. Current laboratory-scale comminution characterisation tests do not allow the decoupling of ore properties from the machine environment. In this research a fundamental approach has been applied to isolate the primary breakage properties of rock (i.e. Fracture Force, Tensile Strength, Stiffness) and investigate the relationships between these breakage properties and the ore characterisation (mineralogy, texture) which would be useful for geometallurgical applications, new comminution modelling and for prediction of processing characteristics before the physical testwork is undertaken.