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Rutile – Zircon Mining on East Coast Surfing Beaches – Rutile-Zirconium Producing Companies in Australia

Jan 10, 1964

By R. F. Miller

DUE to wartime secrecy restrictions a large part of the technical information developed by government and industrial laboratories was withheld from distribution. Much of this information has now been released or "declassified" and reports of technical work carried out during the war in allied and enemy countries are also becoming available. Information on the latter subject has been augmented by the work of the Technical Industrial Intelligence Corps of the U. S. Army. Through the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rep¬resentatives of this Corps co-operated with the British Combined Intelligence Observations Subcommittee, and some of the observations were made by combined personnel of both groups. The U. S. Government has undertaken the indexing and abstracting of all of this information in the Bibliography of Scientific and Industrial Reports, a weekly bulletin which appeared first early in 1946. Other publications, such as the Bulletin of the British Iron and Steel Institute and The Metals Review of the American Society for Metals, provide abstracts of domestic and foreign magazine articles and papers presented to technical societies. However, they do not cover the industrial and government reports recently released by the Government nor the reports of the Army investigators hence the new bibliography is a welcome addition to our metallurgical library.

Jan 1, 1947

By F. F. McINTOSH

STEEL is a general name applied to the alloys of iron and carbon. These alloys always contain , other elements such as manganese, silicon, sulfur, and phosphorus. Manganese and silicon are usually considered to be alloying elements. Sulfur and phosphorus are regarded as impurities. Tradition has damned them both and, in addition to classifying them as impurities, has established the general impression that many of the ills of steels are the result of the presence of one or both of these elements. Metallurgists are inclined to question the soundness of this tradition. The fact that one blast-furnace plant is devoted entirely to the production of ferro-phosphorus which is used to rephosphorize basic open-hearth steel, and that sulfur is added to many heats of steel, indicates that these so- called impurities might also be classed as alloying elements, and that the tradition which damns them may not be altogether fair and well founded. A critical search through the technical literature on the effect of phosphorus on steel will disclose many references to its harmful effect. Most of these are general in character, but there has been a strong tendency to accept this traditional belief in the harmful effect of the element.

Jan 1, 1926

By E. D. Hummer

During the planning of the fine coal cleaning addition at the Gary, W. Va., Coal Preparation Plant of United States Steel Corp. careful consideration was directed toward the problem of minus 48 mesh refuse disposal. The plant flow sheet included wet screening the raw coal at ¼ in., pumping the minus ¼ in. raw coal to bowl desiltors for desliming, and then cleaning the deslimed raw coal on tables. The material to be removed from the circuit as minus 48 mesh refuse consisted of the minus 100 mesh desiltor overflow thickened in two 120 ft diam thickeners and minus 1 mm screened from the table refuse. Later a flotation plant was added to recover coal from the desiltor overflow, and a classifier replaced the screens to make a sharper size separation of the table refuse at 48 mesh. Today the minus 48 mesh refuse at Gary consists of thickened flotation tailing and thickened spiral classifier overflow. The transportation of large quantities of fine, wet refuse filter cake mixed with jig and table refuse over existing conveying equipment would have been neither dependable nor economical. Filtration was therefore impractical, and disposal of the fine materials was a problem. The decision was to pump the material to storage ponds.

Jan 3, 1965

By AIME AIME

DESTRUCTION of the plants, machines, utilities, tools, materials, and other essentials for peacetime living penalizes not only the owners of the materials destroyed, but the world as a whole. Specifically, the fundamental fallacy of any proposal for the in- discriminate destruction of the German industrial system is that it fails to differentiate between the wartime and the peacetime economy of the Reich. We are for one simple, clear objective-an effective industrial means to keep Germany from starting another war. This objective should not be con- fused, especially before the war is even won, with the appropriate punishment of Germany or with the international arrangements for the long future to be made around the peace table by the representatives of the Allied Nations after victory is achieved. This paper, therefore, does not deal with broad, complex postwar questions of diplomacy and international policy. "Unconditional surrender" implies disarmament of the German armies, the surrender of all arms, munitions, air- planes, and other ordnance material in stock piles or in process. It also should include the elimination of all German war production facilities, such as ordnance plants, munitions plants, and submarine works, and the control of raw materials required by war industries.

Jan 1, 1944

By John W. Vanderwilt

THE Climax district is in northeastern Lake County, Colorado, on Fremont Pass (elevation 11,320 ft.) where the continental divide runs east-west joining high peaks of the Mosquito Range with the Sawatch Range, prominent ranges of the central Rocky Mountains. The mining towns of Leadville and Kokomo are thirteen miles to the south and seven miles to the northwest, respectively. Good highways lead to Denver (100 miles) by way of Kokomo, Loveland Pass, and Idaho Springs, and to Colorado Springs by way of Leadville. The ore deposit and mine are about one mile east of Fremont Pass and 600 ft. higher on the southwestern flank of Bartlett Mountain, a peak in the Mosquito Range. The molybdenite deposit lies within the Colorado mineral belt extending across the Rocky Mountains from Jamestown and Boulder to Silverton and Telluride. (See Fig. 1.) Fremont Pass is a broad open divide separating the drainage of the Tenmile River (Pacific) from that of the East Fork of the Arkansas River (Atlantic) ; but the mountains to the east and west are extremely rugged; altitudes in the vicinity vary from 11,000 to 14,000 ft. A conspicuous topographic feature within the district is the Tenmile Amphitheater, which lies east of Climax and

Jan 1, 1946

By John V. Beall

Cutting costs and increasing safety with new ideas is the byword with The Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Co. on the Marquette Range in Michigan. Among the new ideas being tried out are mechanical shaft mucking, prefabricated lagging to replace timber poles, Carset bits in shaft sinking, and rubber tired guide wheels on the ore skips. Plans are being made to stockpile ore with conveyor belts during the winter. In sinking the Mather "B" Shaft a 3/8-yd clamshell-type bucket is used for mucking. The clamshell is opened and closed by means of a verticallymounted hydraulic ram actuated by 5000 psi oil pressure. An Ingersoll Rand-type hoist is used to raise and lower the clamshell. The hoist is controlled by one member of the crew on the floor of the shaft. When the bucket is raised, the men swing it over the muck pile to the desired position and then it is lowered on to the broken rock. The 1400-lb weight of the bucket causes it to sink into the broken rock and it digs as the ram closes the bucket. The hydraulic ram is operated by a man on the lowest shaft steel set who controls a specially designed oil pump which supplies oil pressure. The clamshell is emptied.

Jan 1, 1949

By H. C. LIVINGSTON

At the Hanna No. 4-A mine of The Union Pacific Coal Co. a new system of trackless mining is being utilized to extract a 26-ft coal seam. By using shuttle cars and a conveyor belt for haulage in the rooms and panel entries instead of pit cars and panel hoist a saving of 12 cents per ton is expected. Mining is conducted in a 26-ft coal seam laid down on a synclinal structure with active workings on a pitch of approximately ten to twelve degrees. The coal seam is interbedded between a shale bottom and sand- stone top. The coal is friable, high in moisture, and subject to spontaneous combustion. The mine is rated gassy by the State Coal Mine Inspection Department. Mining is conducted at the present time by unbalanced rope haulage an main slopes spaced on approximate 4300-ft centers with the three-entry system driven to boundary lines, strike entries being turned on approximate 1300-ft centers. Panels are driven to the rise between entries at approximately 750-ft intervals with panel rooms driven on the strike 500 to 600 ft long, leaving 150 ft of barrier pillar between each block of panel rooms.

Jan 1, 1949

By AIME AIME

ORGANIZATION of The Federated American Engineering Societies was effected at the organizing conference of national, local, state and regional engineering and allied technical organizations at the Cosmos Club, Washington, D. C., June 3 and 4. Thus is brought into being the greatest national engineering society in the world. The object of the organization is to further the interests of the public through the use of technical knowledge and engineering experience, and to consider and act upon matters common to engineering and allied technical professions. Prominent engineers from all parts of the country, representing more than 75 engineering societies, with an aggregate membership of more than 125,000, participated in the organization. The constitution as adopted by the conference, calls for the creation of s managing body to be known as the American Engineering Council, and its executive board. The belief was expressed that the entire organization would come to be spoken of as the American Engineering Council. The council is to coordinate the activities of state councils and of local affiliations whenever these activities are of national or general importance or may affect the general interests of engineers. Representation in the council is to be according to membership of the component societies.

Jan 1, 1920

By AIME AIME

A SPECIAL meeting arranged by the Petroleum and Gas Committee of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers was held on Tuesday and Wednesday, Sept. 21 and 22, in the Assembly Room of the American Annex Hotel, St. Louis, Mo. Preceding the first session on Tuesday morning, the members and guests were registered and presented with the usual Institute badges. The morning session was opened at 10:30 by Ralph Arnold of Los Angeles, Calif., Chairman of the Petroleum and Gas Committee. In his opening remarks, he suggested that the petroleum section specialize more and more on the technical problems of the oil industry and that an effort be made to enlarge the membership of the Institute among the technical men of the industry. The following program was presented : OIL FIELDS OF RUSSIA, by A. Beeby Thompson and T. G. Madgwick, of London, England. Presented by H. A. Wheeler; discussed by Arthur Knapp and R. VanA. Mills. This most comprehensive paper was one of what is hoped to be a series to be presented by some of our foreign members. It is by far the best description in English of the world-famous Baku and other fields of Russia.

Jan 1, 1920

"The Tooele plant is situated at the mouth of Pine Canyon, five miles northeast of Tooele City. The site forms one terminus of the Tooele Valley railway, which runs southwest through Tooele City to Warner, a station on the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, thirty-five miles southwest of Salt Lake City.An aerial tramway, four miles in length, crosses the Oquirrh Mountains and connects the plant with the Bingham district.The plant consists of a lead-zinc flotation concentrator, lead smelter and copper smelter.SAMPLING MILL The mill is a standard Taylor and Brunton sampling mill, built in two sections, each with a capacity of 100 tons per hour. The building is of steel and concrete, 40x84 feet. A well-equipped pulping, sampling and drying room is attached.All ore is sampled here and then distributed by conveyors to cencentrator, lead smelter and copper smelter bins.CONCENTRATOR This flotation mill is arranged in two units of 500 tons capacity each, one equipped with Callow pneumatic flotation cells, the other with Mineral Separation sub-aeration machines.The feed is maintained as uniform as possible by bedding, after coarse crushing at the sampling mill. Standard practice of ball mill grinding and classification is followed."

Jan 1, 1925

By D. R. Mitchell

FOR the second consecutive year, attendance at the Coal Division sessions far exceeded exoectations. Those in charge were continually faced with problems of finding seats and space for attending members. 115 seats were set - II~ for the annual luncheon meeting of the Division and approximately 175 members showed un. Since the hotel management would not serve more than the 115 it meant that 60 members were forced to eat elsewhere. This created hard feelings with some members. How- ever, officials of the Division were not able to obtain in advance any indication of this overflow crowd, but are suggesting to the New York Office that some means other than ticket sales be adopted to obtain an estimate of Division luncheon and dinner attendance. Members could be circularized prior to he meeting or they could be checked when registering as to the events they expect to attend. Under the inspiring leadership of Cadwallader Evans, Jr., Chairman, the Coal Division had a phenomenal growth during the year. Reporting at the luncheon meeting, Newel1 Alford stated that approximately 190 new members had been obtained. A few more years of continuing increase at this rate will make the Coal Division one of the largest Divisions in the Institute.

Jan 1, 1944

By AIME AIME

THE sixteenth annual meeting of the Woman's Aux¬iliary, A. I. M. E., was held Tuesday morning, Feb. 16, at the Engineering Societies Building. The meeting was well attended, there being 99 registered from the metropolitan area and 78 from the sections throughout the United States. Mrs. Sharpless, the secretary, read the minutes of the annual meeting held a year ago, after which Mrs. Bassett, the president, gave her address of welcome. Mrs. Bassett said in part: "I would like, at this time, to welcome you all to this, our sixteenth annual meeting, and to express my appreciation to all the national officers and members of the board of directors for their loyal support and for the excellent work done by the chairmen of sections and their members. It is with much pleasure that I look back upon my visits with the sections in Washington, Arizona, Northern and Southern California, Chicago, Colorado, Western Pennsylvania and Utah before I assumed the office of president. During the last year I have much enjoyed meeting with the sections in Boston, Washington and New York. It is our duty to see that the achievement for 1932 be equal to that of the year that has just passed."

Jan 1, 1932

By AIME

A present the colleges and universities are struggling to meet the responsibilities placed upon them by the return of the veterans from the armed forces to the educational institutions as well as the youth graduating from the high schools. The problems of meeting these responsibilities are complex and upon the shoulders of the educational administrators lies much of the burden. One of those educators who is in the midst of this situation is James Rowland Cudworth, dean of the College of Engineering of the University of Alabama and Chairman of the Mineral Industry Education Division, AIME, both for 1946 and 1947. He was born at Norwich, Conn., on Sept. 23, 1897, and like his father before him went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received his Bachelor's degree in 1921. His studies at MIT were mainly in the fields of geological and mining engineering. Why a New Englander studies mining is anybody's guess, but it may be due to a love of traveling to far places which so many New Englanders do. After graduating tinder the famed Waldemar Lindgren. Jim trekked to Mexico where he worked at Pachuca for the Cia. Real del Monte and at Charcas with the American Smelting and Refining Co.

Jan 1, 1946

By Walter O. Roberts

A TOTAL eclipse of the sun is a brief, exciting spectacle witnessed by most men but once or twice during a lifetime. But to an astronomer an eclipse of the sun is an event of utmost scientific importance. For then, certain phenomena of the sun normally obscured by the brilliant glare of sunlight become spectacularly visible. For over seventy years prior to 1930 astronomers vainly attempted to discover a means of observing all of these eclipse features of the sun without a natural eclipse. But in 1930, through the genius of the French scientist, Bernard Lyot, astronomers met final success. Dr. Lyot invented a new kind of telescope known as a coronagraph, which made possible photography of all of the eclipse features of the sun. In 1940 Harvard University completed final testing of its Lyot-type coronagraph. the only one in the Western Hemisphere, and shipped it to Climax, where Donald H. Menzel, of Harvard College Observatory, supervised its establishment on the southeastern edge of the mining community of the Climax Molybdenum Co., with whose help and advice the modern residence and telescope dome of the observatory were constructed. Ever since that summer the station has been operated by me, first as a graduate student, and now as a staff member of Harvard College Observatory.

Jan 1, 1946

By Noel W. Kirshenbaum, George A. Pouska, James M. Link

Literally millions of words have been written on the subject of mineral slurry pipelining. The sheer bulk of literature on the subject should be enough to convince the interested observer that the method is both viable and widely applied. It is the intent of this paper to examine typical mineral slurry applications. This examination should reveal the reasons that the slurry system was selected over other transport modes and it should provide a framework for determining the applicability of the technique to new projects. Slurry transport involves the conveyance of solid particles by suspension in a moving liquid. Almost any combination of solids in liquids may be imagined, and the conduit may be an open channel or a closed pipe. Historically, the most numerous slurry transport applications consisted of mineral particles in water. However, current research investigations are emphasizing other liquid carriers, specifically those which have greater economic value. Among these are gaseous and liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks. Another area being investigated involves the use of the pipeline as a chemical reactor system. The long residence time and turbulent flow characteristics of the pipeline make it particularly attractive for certain chemical reactions. Because these new systems involve a valuable liquid as well as a valuable solid, there is increased attention to solid-liquid

Jan 1, 1980

By H. F. Yancey

AT the annual meeting of this Institute held two years ago a new method, of estimating the grindability of coal was described, based on experimental work carried on by the Bureau of Mines at its Northwest Experiment Station. Since that time, several organizations concerned with the testing or utilization of coal as pulverized fuel have adopted and used the method in determining the grindability of several hundred samples of coal. In addition, a series of comparative tests of this method and three others has been carried out in five laboratories under the auspices of Committee D-5 of the American Society for Testing Materials. As a result the Committee has recommended that the Bureau of Mines method, designated as the "ball-mill method," and the Hardgrove method2, previously advanced, be accepted as tentative standards3. Since the ball-mill method was originally developed and published, an opportunity has been presented to apply it to a larger number of coals and to study intensively some of the principles upon which the method is based. This paper presents a resume of these further studies and includes a comparison with the Hardgrove-machine method. Trial runs were also made with another procedure recently proposed-the C.I.T. roll-test method4.

Jan 1, 1936

By Alfred Heggem

IT is the purpose of this article to describe methods recently introduced into the oil and natural gas industry to safeguard the lives of the workmen and to protect property from destruction. Only such drilling methods are described as pertain directly to the operations necessary to maintain the well under complete control at all times. Wells Formerly Drilled Without Controlling Equipment It may seem incredible that practically all wells, until recently, were drilled without the provision of any means for control. To drill a hole into a boiler carrying high-pressure steam without first providing means to control the escape of steam would be unthinkable, yet in oil fields wells are drilled into a gas or oil formation with a possible pressure of 300 to 1,800 lb. per square inch and a daily flow of 20,000,000 to 80,000,000 cu. ft. of gas or 1,000 to 15,000 bbl. of oil per day. Some wells have produced in excess of 100,000 bbl. of oil per day, but these are exceptional cases. In addition to the loss of product, one must consider the great danger attendant upon the promiscuous liberation of such an amount of explosive and inflammable substance.

Jan 1, 1916

By Marion Rice

THE copper-mining district of Jerome, Ariz., is of such economic importance that the following brief notes may be of interest. The ore deposits are said by Ransome1 to be pre-Cambrian, and are contained in the pre-Cambrian schists of the region. In the vicinity of the mine (the United Verde) the schist stands nearly vertical .and strikes a little west of north. At least three varieties are distinguishable-(1) a green rock, schistose, on its margins but grading into massive material, which is evidently an altered dioritic intrusive; (2) a rough gray schist with abundant pheno-crysts of quartz, apparently an altered rhyolite; and (3) a satiny, greenish gray, very fissile sericitic schist that may be a metamorphosed sediment. The ore occurs in varieties (2) and (3), the main belt of dioritic rock (1) lying just west of the orebodies. The ore is said to follow as a rule the layers of fine sericitic schist. T. A. Rickard2 says that the ore at the United. Verde Extension mine is found at the contact of diorite and schist, that both diorite and ore are earlier than the regional metamorphism, and that the quartz porphyry (" rhyolite" of Ransome) is of post-Cambrian age.

Jan 9, 1918

By D. D. Pollock, D. I. Finch

Relationships between the compositions of specially prepared manganin-type alloys and some of their electrical properties have been established. Empirical equations, based upon the electronic configurations of the alloying elements, are given which describe the resistivity, temperature coefficient, peak temperature, and thermoelectric power of Cu-Mn-Ni-Fe alloys at approximately room temperature. Calculations based upon these relationships are correlated with experimental data. SECURING suitable alloys for the construction of stable resistors, for use in precise electrical measuring devices, has been important ever since the art of electrical measurement was begun. German silver, Pt-Ag, and Platinoid are examples of some of the alloys in early use. These early alloys were un- satisfactory for one or more of the following reasons: l—insufficient stability of electrical properties with time, 2—poor reproducibility of electrical characteristics from melt to melt, 3—excessive temperature coefficients of resistance, and 4—excessive cost. Weston introduced the Cu-Mn-Fe and Cu-Mn-Ni-Fe alloys of the type now generally known as manganins. His patents are believed to represent the first disclosure of any alloy with a negative temperature coefficient of resistance. After this work, the German company, Isabellenhutte, in conjunction with Feussner and St. Lindeck, produced alloys of

Jan 1, 1957