Imperial College London, United Kingdom

Imperial College London is a university of Science, Engineering and Medicine. It is ranked in the top 10 universities in the world – 3rd in Europe and 8th in the world by the Times Higher Education – and is home to the greatest concentration of high-impact research of any major UK university (REF 2014). Imperial College hosts the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, a world-leader in research in efficient and sustainable mineral and energy resource extraction. Imperial College has a particularly strong reputation for translating fundamental research into solutions to industry.

The Advanced Mineral Processing Research Group at the Royal School of Mines studies fundamental aspects of froth flotation, heap leaching and physical separations in order to enhance our understanding of the processes and improve performance. Of particular relevance to this proposal, the group’s research on the froth phase in flotation has had an industrial implementation in mineral concentrators worldwide and has yielded control systems and novel tank designs to improve flotation recovery.

The Imperial College London team has unique and world-leading expertise in combining experimental techniques (e.g. flowing foam experiments, high-speed video of particle-bubble phenomena, Positron Emission Particle Tracking) with advanced computational modelling to develop new, rigorous solutions for industry. Their research has led to the development of state-of-the-art numerical models to simulate complex phenomena in flotation froths, which have been successfully validated at a bench and industrial scale and have informed the further development of measurement techniques to characterise froth stability.