Grant: Alliance Grants

The proposed research is aimed at advancing a novel energy-efficient comminution technology, transcritical carbon dioxide (tCO2) comminution for the mining industry. Mining is a major economic driver of the Canadian economy contributing about 5% to the gross domestic product. With Canada's goal to recover minerals that are critical to the transition to renewable energy, there is a need to advance technologies that will support the goals of maintaining leadership in advanced technologies. At the same time, mining is energy inefficient, particularly in the process of crushing and grinding rocks (comminution) which utilizes about 40% of all energy at a mining operation. There is therefore a need to advance novel energy efficient comminution technologies. tCO2 comminution breaks rock in tension which is 10 to 30 times more efficient than conventional technologies that break rocks via compression, impact and attrition. The overall goal is to advance tCO2 comminution for industrial application by addressing five objectives: 1. To identify rock properties that are most important to tCO2 comminution, 2. Determine the effect of pre-conditioning of the rock to create rock properties that improve the amenability to tCO2 comminution, 3. To develop a fundamental understanding of thermodynamic conditions that affect rock breakage, 4. To assess the effect of tCO2 comminution on subsequent mineral separation/concentration processes and 5. To develop a system-wide model for tCO2 comminution to support scale-up of the technology. The research will be carried out using three models of the tCO2 comminutoin technology developed by Rockburst Technologies, the Minimum Viable Experiment (MVE), the Alpha test unit and the Beta test unit, all of which are hosted within the UBC Center fore Mineral Processing Lab.