UCT excelled at the 27th International Mineral Processing Congress (IMPC), taking three of the ten Young Author Awards.  The congress was held in Santiago, Chile, in October, and the Department of Chemical Engineering was well represented with 14 delegates attending. Emeritus Professor Cyril O’Connor, the Chair of the IMPC Council, said, “This has never happened before at an IMPC, that one university received three out of the ten Young Author Awards.”  

The Young Author Awards are awarded for the most outstanding papers presented where the main author is under 35 years of age. The three were chosen from a shortlist of 43 authors who entered the “competition” out of a total of about 600 papers that were accepted out of 900 abstracts submitted.

The awards went to Margreth Tadie (PhD student), Lucy van de Ruit, (MSc student), and Dr Lawrence Bbosa, (senior lecturer), all from the Centre for Minerals Research (CMR) in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

The title of Tadie’s paper was Electrochemical interactions of some platinum group minerals with flotation reagents.  Her co-authors were Kirsten Corin, Jenny Wiese, Michael Nicol (Murdoch University, Australia) and Cyril O’Connor.  Van de Ruit’s paper was titled  A mineralogical investigation of the effect of particle shape on chromite entrainment for a UG2 ore. Her co-authors were Megan Becker, Jenny Wiese and Aubrey Mainza. Bbosa’s paper was Probability based model for the power draw of a tumbling mill, and his co-authors were Aubrey Mazina and Indresan Govender.

The director of the Centre for Minerals Research, Professor Dave Deglon said, “This is an exceptional outcome for three young authors out of ten to come from the same institution and, in this case, from the same research centre. The IMPC is the premier world conference in minerals processing and delegates attend from hundreds of research institutions around the world.”