Engineering and Mining Journal - Whether the market is copper, gold, nickel, iron ore, lead/zinc, PGM, diamonds or other commodities, E&MJ takes the lead in projecting trends, following development and reporting on the most efficient operating pr
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F LO TAT I O N New Technology and Applications for Flotation through Systematic Product Development Key elements for success are close partnerships with customers, and an effective productdevelopment management system that minimizes cost and technological risks By Dr. Eric Bain Wasmund More than a century ago, froth flotation became one of the key technologies for enabling the development of modern infrastructure and societies. For the first time, industrially important metalliferous ores such as those containing copper could be concentrated in an economical way and to concentration levels that would allow them to be processed on a large "mass production" scale to produce metals. Great strides have been made in the unit operations and processes for concentrating metals, and major improvements continue to be made. The main objective is to improve recovery of the mineral to some acceptable level of enrichment while reducing the amount of energy required. In other words, the primary goal is to minimize the amount of wasted ore and wasted energy during the enrichment process. As the world's demand for these important minerals increases, miners have been forced to develop resources with more challenging ore characteristics and lower grades. The response of the flotation business is to meet this challenge by continuously developing new technology and products through a purposeful approach. The Eriez Flotation Division (EFD), a division of Eriez Manufacturing, is focused on providing flotation and sparging technology, mainly to the mineral processing industry. EFD, with offices in six countries, serves the major markets of base metals and gold, industrial minerals, iron ore, potash, phosphate, coal and energy products. The EFD product line consists of column flotation cells and sparging systems, and other hydraulic separation systems. Eriez acquired much of its flotation technology through the acquisition of Canadian Process Technologies (CPT) in 2007. Prior to the acquisition, Eriez had independently developed HydroFloat technology for the flotation Figure 1—Eriez Flotation's StackCell, originally developed as a modified column for cleaning coal, has proven to be efficient for reducing energy requirements and improving recovery in other mineral processing applications. 44 E&MJ; • AUGUST 2013 of coarse particles, which now is also part of the EFD product portfolio. Together, the combined technologies now cover a range of particle sizes from less than 10 micron to well over 3 mm. The key to EFD's successful development of new products and applications has been a close partnership with customers during the development process. Experts in the field of new product development suggest that more than 80% of new product ideas originate with the customer. For EFD, this means discussions with customers, engineering houses, comparative plant trials, and detailed analyses of the results are a major part of its business model. Another well-documented fact about new product development is that the conversion rate from new product idea to successful product launch is only about 10%–20%. Additionally, development costs increase proportionally as a new product idea moves through the development process. To effectively manage the cost and to maximize the success of developing new products, many companies have adopted a riskmanagement system that funds projects as they progressively overcome measurable and pre-defined hurdles. Some of these hurdles would be: a demonstration of a clear advantage over the current technology (i.e., product differentiation), a compelling value proposition from the customer's point of view, a market analysis, and a model that shows the potential for profitability. These types of risk management systems should be very familiar to people in the mining industry since a similar system of studies, sometimes called "front end loading," is used to fund development projects from scoping through feasibility, and ultimately to implementation. At the completion of each study or stage, a decision is made whether to move forward with the prowww.e-mj.com